Keith Duckworth: The Man Who Made Formula One Affordable

The Royal Air Force, an organisation not known for its sense of humour, has a special designation for pilots it deems a bit too enthusiastic. It’s called ‘dangerous flying,’ and in the 1950s, a young engineer named Keith Duckworth was grounded for precisely that. This was probably for the best, as it allowed him to channel his particular brand of reckless genius into something far more useful: designing the engine that would allow a bunch of glorious British bodgers to conquer the world of Formula One.

Duckworth was a blunt, brilliant engineer from Blackburn who had little time for authority and even less for inefficiency. He had started his career working for Colin Chapman at Lotus, a partnership of two colossal brains and even more colossal egos that, predictably, ended in a furious row about money. This history added a delicious layer of irony to the fact that Chapman, a few years later, would desperately need Duckworth to build him a winner. Duckworth left and, with fellow Lotus man Mike Costin, founded Cosworth.

The Best £100,000 Ever Spent

By the mid-1960s, Formula One needed a new engine, and Chapman had an idea. He went to Ford, who, after presumably checking that the £100,000 request wasn't a typo and that Chapman wasn’t under the influence of any illegal substance, agreed to fund the project. The job of designing the engine was given to one man: Keith Duckworth.

His design, the DFV or "Double Four Valve," was a masterpiece of brutal pragmatism. But its greatest piece of genius was that it was designed to be the car's spine. You didn't put the DFV in a car; you bolted the front end to the engine and the back end to the gearbox. The engine became the whole skeleton.

A Reasonably Promising Start

The DFV was bolted into the back of a new Lotus for the 1967 Dutch Grand Prix. Nobody knew if it would last a single lap. It went on to win the race. A reasonably promising start, then. Suddenly, every ambitious team in the pit lane wanted one. And this is where Duckworth changed the sport forever. Unlike Ferrari, who would rather die than sell their precious engines to a rival, Cosworth would sell a DFV to anyone who turned up with a cheque. It was the great leveller, the equivalent of giving every small, ambitious nation its own nuclear deterrent. The old superpowers were suddenly very nervous.

The Screaming from Maranello

The effect on the established order, particularly Ferrari, was catastrophic. For years, Enzo had believed that only he, with his quasi-religious approach, had the right to win. Now, his magnificent V12 engines that shrieked with a beautiful, complex fury were being routinely humiliated by an off-the-shelf engine that, in comparison, sounded like a bag of nails in a tumble dryer and was being used by teams operating out of garages that probably had leaky roofs. The screaming from Maranello must have been audible from space.

For the next fifteen years, the hard, guttural bark of the Cosworth DFV was the sound of Formula One. The grid at any given race was essentially a collection of brilliant British chassis designers all using the same magnificent engine. It powered cars from McLaren, Tyrrell, Williams, and a dozen others. It won 155 Grand Prix races and 12 drivers' world championships. It was an era of glorious, noisy, and wonderfully diverse competition, all made possible because one man had designed a brilliant hammer in a world of fragile, expensive stilettos.

Unleashing the Hooligans

While the DFV was conquering the racetrack, Duckworth's company was also applying its genius to making humble road cars go obscenely fast. This was the birth of the "Cossie." They created the brilliant BDA engine for the Ford Escort RS1600 - essentially a detuned racing engine in a shopping car. Then came their most famous creation: the engine for the Sierra RS Cosworth. They took a humble Ford block, added a sophisticated twin-cam head and a turbocharger the size of a watermelon, and created a legend.

Their next audacious piece of mainstream work was for Aston Martin. When Ford, who owned Aston at the time, needed a new V12, they went to Cosworth and asked them to do something clever: effectively stitch together the architecture of two Ford Mondeo V6 engines. The result was Aston Martin's magnificent 6.0-litre V12, the engine that would power a whole generation of DB7s, DB9s and Vanquishes. It was the ultimate "Cossie" trick: a heart of pure, blue-blooded British exotica, with the sensible DNA of a grand tourer.

A Legacy in Metal

Duckworth was a man of few words, most of them blunt. He was famously unimpressed by the glamour of the sport his engine was dominating, and preferred the logic of the drawing board to the champagne of the pit lane. His genius was in creating a simple, effective, and reliable tool that was so good it completely dominated the sport for a generation.

He died in 2005, a quiet giant of British engineering. His legacy is immense. With one single, brilliant design, he broke the stranglehold of the big, secretive factory teams and ushered in the golden age of the independent British Formula One constructor. He was the man who gave the people power.