One of the (many) reasons why the V16 BRM was unsuccessful was the centrifugal supercharger. It developed a vast amount of power but all at the top of the rev range. This made the car impossible to drive fast on normal road cisrcuits.
I have heard it said, I think by tony Rudd in his autobiography, that the problem would have been overcome if the car had used the vortex throttle system that was designed for it.
Now, I think I know what a vortex is, and I certainly know what a throttle is, but I can't imagine what a vortex throttle is, nor how it would have helped the V16. Also, why was it not used?

As a real fan of the V16 BRM, it delights me to hear that someone thinks something they planned could have helped... but I can't remember any mention of this in the Mays/Roberts book... and as for Rudd, was he not what one might call a 'latter day saint' at BRM? I'm sure he didn't come onto the scene until about 1960 or 1961 and was most closely involved in the V8 project (which used V16 rods, anyway).
More on this subject would be most interesting... just imagine driving the thing, 250bhp through a sweeper turning to 500bhp as the revs rose by 600rpm!

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Life and love are mixed with pain...

BRM V16 (1,039 KB)

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Regards,

Dennis David
Grand Prix History

Life is racing, the rest is waiting

Thanks Dennis. Here's where that sound came from:

Ray, tony rudd worked with BRM from the early days of the V16, initially on secondment from Rolls-Royce. His level of responsibility seems to have waxed and waned with the whims of Mays and Berthon but he was responsible for the design of the space-frame version of the 2.5litre car. In 1962 Sir Alfred Owen gave him complete control, with results that are well known. I would recommend his autobiography to anyone who doesn't have it. It deals with his career at rolls-Royce, BRM and Lotus and is one of the best combinations of entertainment and information I know.

As far as the vortex throttle is concerned, I was wrong about it's being mentioned in Rudd's book. I've looked through the "usual suspects" (Pomeroy, Jenkinson and Nye) but the only mention I found is in Leonard Setright's "The Grand Prix".

Apparantly the system was designed by R-R and was intended to keep boost pressure constant at over 10,000rpm. THis would enable higher perssure to be used at lower revs and would overcome the problem of a steeply rising torque curve.

Sounds like driveability at the expense of top end power...
Not good enough to get the press, hence the money to keep going...

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Life and love are mixed with pain...

I think the whole BRM V16 story is fascinating and those that only view it as a failure are missing out.

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Regards,

Dennis David
Grand Prix History

Life is racing, the rest is waiting

I don't apolgise for digging out this thread....people have arrived since Roger started it.

I have read about the vortex throttle with respect to the V16 BRM somewhere recently, and wondered what the heck it was...would have sworn it was in the Tony Rudd book.

So....of what did the R-R system consist?

I have the little Rivers Fletcher book about the V16- the one with all the cutaway drawings on film that overlay each other. These words are included from Pomeroy....

"Fuel is supplied by mechanical pumps to a pair of specially developed SU carburettors, early experiments with fuel injection into the eye of the supercharger impeller having proved abortive"

Relevant?

OK - none of you have been reading the right books - the original fuel-injection idea incorporated an iris-type throttle - like the adjustable-aperture iris in a camera, and it was judged contemporarily to be "beyond the development capability of the team in terms of time, money and men". I drove a Mark II and I spun it when trying to provoke a slide - the very instant the rear tyres broke traction I was lost in a world of runaway revs and wheelspin, a cacophony of noise and a blurr of rotating scenery... Ooh I felt such a prat...

DCN

A prat?...when Moss said it was the worst car he had ever driven?

So is this iris thingy a vortex throttle?

Not quite - vortex throttling involved inducing variable swirl to the inlet airflow, and it was more cmplex than a camera iris, which is a simplistic - 20-second - description.

It was part of the original master-scheme devised by Rolls-Royce supercharger specialists Prof Allen and 'Oscar' Wilde of the Compressor Section of R-R's Experimental Department, and approved by Lord Hives of R-R for the BRM project by February 1947.

It comprised an array of nine vanes introduced into the supercharger intake, each of which could swivel about its individual perpendicular axis to vary swirl as it entered the impeller stage. These swirl vanes were to be actuated automatically by a servo piston controlled by boost pressure or engine speed.

Below 9,000rpm these vanes would present edge-on to the intake flow to create negligible pressure loss, but above 10,000rpm they would swivel progressively to swirl the incoming mixture in the same direction of rotation as the adjacent - fast rotating - impeller blades.

Reducing the mixture's change of angular momentum through the impellers lowered the temperature rise and pressure ratio achieved. Ahead of these vanes was a butterfly throttle controlled in the normal manner by the driver. Although the 'eye of the supercharger' SU fuel injection and vortex throttle system were both manufactured neither would ever be raced.

There's a bloody brilliant book which describes all this...

DCN

Well, I've been reading Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere by Jan Morris and she doesn't appear to have addressed the issue of vortex throttling in any meaningfuil way.

Touche, as they say in the Isle of Wight...thank you Roger...for having quoted the above before you saw mine and deleted yours....

Blimey. Thankyou Doug and Roger. I suppose the V16 was complicated enough without that lot. Ingest one gnat and the whole shooting match would jam up?

Vortex throttling has something to do with sex changes??? (yes...been Googling! )

'Course, the fascinating thing is Fangio and Gonzales loved to mash the throttle pedal of those things! And didn't Gonzales make a few upper BRM team members' eyes pop when he demonstrated how truly awful the front end was. Not that he was going to lift, though.

Cliff Reuter's post about film of 1950's SCCA racing led me to "The Chicane" website, where one can view all 57 minutes of Karl Ludvigsen's 2007 RAC Club lecture about the BRM V16
http://thechicaneblog.com/2010/01/22/karl-...rm-v16-lecture/

Did Stanley (later Sir Stanley) Hooker play no part in this then? Maybe he was by then too occupied with gas turbine aircraft engines ...?

There is no mention of BRM involvement in Stanley Hooker's wonderful autobiography "Not Much of an Engineer". (well worth a read ...). At around this time he was much distracted by development problems with what became the RR Avon, plus a row with Ernest Hives plus (I think) a divorce - it all led to him leaving RR and joining Bristol Engine Co.

When he got to Bristol Engines, they presented him with the prototype Proteus, saying that the design brief was to create the most powerful gas-turbine in the world regardless of weight : the engineers mournfully reported "So far, we have achieved the weight target ....".

SGH was an all-round Brit genius engineer and also the man who rescued the RB211 from extinction when it had bankrupted RR in 1971.
Nick
Did Stanley (later Sir Stanley) Hooker play no part in this then? Maybe he was by then too occupied with gas turbine aircraft engines ...?
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Hooker had indeed moved, in January 1943, to the ex-Rover factory at Barnoldswick to be Chief Engineer for Rolls-Royce's gas turbine engines. As Nick says, following the decision by Ernest Hives to move gas turbine development to Derby, Hooker and Hives fell out and Hooker left RR in September 1948.