Keith Duckworth has died

Sorry to see from autosport-atlas Keith died yesterday. We always seem to lose someone of engineering stature around this time - Walter Hayes, John Cooper & now Keith. RIP.

A travesty that he was not knighted for his services to motor racing, let alone engineering.

A true F1 legend.

Unbelievable. I had been trying to contact Keith since about August for an interview in my video series, `Yesterday`s Racers`. Both Steve H & I agreed that Keith would have been a brilliant interviewee. I never had a reply to my letters and e-mail, perhaps Keith was already ill. Whatever, we shall never see his like again, RIP.

How very sad, and somewhat amplified by the time of year we are in.

I only met Keith a couple of times, but I know his son Roger fairly well and so my thoughts are with him and his family.

SH**, He made a magnificent contribution to motor racing.
David B

RIP

That is quite upsetting to hear. He can't have been THAT old.

Very sad news indeed, RIP.

I still don't want to be seriously rich. Neither am I interested in
external honours. Having had a go at beating the world at building
racing engines - I do like that. That's a reasonable accolade.

RIP DKD.

Originally posted by Eric McLoughlin
That is quite upsetting to hear. He can't have been THAT old.

72.

Hopefully Cosworth's new V8 will be a fitting tribute

RIP

Originally posted by Richie Jenkins
72.

Yep. According to Richard Garrett ("Anatomy of a Grand Prix driver", 1970) David Keith Duckworth was born on 10 August 1933 in Blackburn, Lancashire (although somewhere I have also seen "September" ).

Oh my goodness, what a sad thing.

I don't buy F1 mags any more, but I do regularly browse them in Smith's, and look in them for any sign of a KD interview. But it was always in vain. That's a real pity. I'd loved to have known what keith thought about engine F1 progress since he retired - so much has changed in that regard.

RIP Keith.

The top table of engine designers is not large but it will forever have a chair with the name of Duckworth carved on it.

Very well put, Roger.

Sleep well Keith

Very sad news. RIP Keith. Best wishes to his friends and family.

------------------- I have just heard the news. This is the passing of a very great Briton.

DCN

So sad to hear of Keith's passing. I idolized him for his enormous accomplishments. In my college days, I used the book, 'Such Sweet Thunder', a history of Cosworth and especially the DFV, as a basis for a paper in metalurgy.

An incomparable talent lost.

I can only add to the long list of superlatives and condolences expressed in this thread. Each one well deserved and heartfelt.

My admiration for Keith Duckworth was beyond any words that I can write. His passing is a great loss to everyone who admired excellence in engineering.

Massively significant man.

Very very sad.

Sad news indeed.

Very sad news to read this morning. His name will forever be linked with progress & achievement.

I had the pleasure of sharing a table with Keith Duckworth and Mike Costin at a BRDC do a few years ago. There was a lot of good-natured joshing between the pair of them. Having only really seen KD speaking on "Nine Days in Summer", his ready wit and relaxed attitude was a great surprise.

A very sad loss.......

As the old saying goes,I wish i could remember a 1/4 off what he forget........ He was to my mind one of the most formost engineer's of our time ,A Legend as passed us by and we shall never forget his name.......... Keith Duckworth .RIP.

Motorsport has so much to thank Keith Duckworth for, and his innovation and contribution will never be forgotten.

RIP

Still a terrible news for the motor racing sport which in this year 2005, will have lost much great personality: Maurice Trintignant, Gerard Crombac, Keith Duckworth...

... rest in peace Keith

Sad news.

Didn't we have another thread that said it all....what would have happened if there had never been the DFV? Only a very few people have had as significant an input into the history of motor racing.

There is an African phrase "He cast a long shadow"

My condolences to all his family and friends.

Another "Grand Prix Legend"

The Cosworth DFV - the finest tribute to an engineering genius.

He will be missed.

RIP Keith.

This is indeed very sad news, what a bad year it has been for deaths of people who are links to the rich history of our sport.

I had the very great privilege of spending some time with Keith while I was researching my Lotus 49 book. I believe he had a reputation for being a bit difficult but (unless he mellowed a lot as he got older!) I found him to be very approachable and willing to talk. As long as the questions I put to him were sensible ones, I got in-depth interesting answers... Remembering our conversations, the thing that struck me was that he had a very considered and deliberate way of talking, much like his approach to engine design, I suppose.

I've just been reading through my transcripts of the interview I did with him and thought you might enjoy a few Duckworth observations. (The usual conventions apply, e.g. this is for the consumption of fellow TNF members only, please don't reproduce it anywhere else).

Clearly he shared some common opinions with Colin Chapman on racing car design:

"He [Chapman] was trying to design light cars to win races. And, unless you start off light, and see whether it fails...if you start off light and it breaks then you will in fact strengthen it up, the pieces that break. An awful lot of bits that you might have thought would have broken, won’t break. And that is the only way of getting a light car. If you start off by designing everything conservatively and nothing fails, there is no way that you are ever going to lighten your car. You never lighten things under those conditions and therefore you don’t learn quickly enough. While people talk about being able to stress cars - and by this stage we’re all into these computer stress calculations - the only problem is that you don’t know how hard your driver is going to hit kerbs in general or you can’t work out what the loads from hitting a kerb on any occasion are going to be and, if you design it such that it will hit brick walls in all directions all the time, you will never win a race. Therefore you actually have to hang it out if you want to make a race winner. Then, I think you’ve got to look at pieces sufficiently often so that your failures should really be fatigue failures from a number of cycles and not be an instant, ultimate failure. With your mechanics and your system of looking at your cars and preparing them, you should be able to catch most things at the stage that, either some stretch in the material - its collapsed a bit - has occurred, or there is a crack forming and you can catch the crack before it is a disastrous failure. The only real way is to design light and then to have loads and loads of inspections and certainly lots of crack detection and other things like that. "

But not on the design of the 'Queerbox', hence his decision to leave Lotus...

"I wasn’t prepared to carry on developing a gearbox that I didn’t think would ever work for any length of time!"

I think the role of other people at Cosworth during the design of the DFV, particularly Mike Costin, is often underplayed. It is clear that they complemented each other very well as a team...

"I am innovative and numerate, whereas Mike is an incredible intuitive engineer and he just knows whether something will work. I’ve caused everybody who is close to me to think very hard about how things work. My thing is you never do sums before you understand what the problem is and you just sit and try and work out what is happening. The Mikes and Bens [Ben Rood] of this world were very quick to pick up the analysis and thinking about problems. Ben was a machine shop man, an incredibly intuitive engineer. He just knows G-forces and can feel what’s happening. Mike just knows how much metal will bend, twist, shape under what load and just knows whether things will work. And we had the communication system that over the phone I could say ‘I’ve thought of a way of doing this. Picture this. Have you got a pencil? Well, we’ve got this here, that there, and so on’ and Mike would draw what he thought I was saying. And then say ‘What I’ve got is this, that and the other’ and I’d say ‘Do you think it’s any good as an idea?’ and he would perhaps just check on another bit and say whether he liked it or he didn’t think it was very good. And if he didn’t think it was very good, or thought there was something wrong with it, he would say that he didn’t like it. He wouldn’t in a lot of cases, explain why he didn’t like it but I reckon he was right about 96% of the time and if he didn’t think something would work or something didn’t sound right I would then go through it all and generally speaking sooner or later, I’d find something wrong with it. Therefore, at all stages, if I was doing something that was innovative or not standard, I would put it to him as to whether he thought that it was sound or not and get his answer. We are wonderful joint operators because we are sharp enough to see that you spend a fair amount of time wrong in this life - or up your whatsit as we normally refer to it - and we can both point out when each other is 'up it'!"

On Clark and Hill in 1967:

"You could actually tell the difference between a Graham Hill engine and a Clark engine by the fact that Clark would have apologised for having over-revved it on two or three occasions and the valve gear would show no signs of having been over-revved, whereas Graham’s had never been over-revved and the valve gear was quite often tatty! I think Clark, he just changed gear gently, didn’t he? There was never any hurry about anything, he had bags of time because he was incredibly good. Graham was really an exceedingly courageous driver, a very brave driver, because I think that he was running at a higher percentage of his ‘tenths’ a higher number of tenths than Jim ever did. I think Jim had prodigious natural ability, whereas Graham was working hard at it. "

He was clearly a big fan of Jim Clark and particularly admired his drive at Monza in 1967:

"He ran out of fuel, ran out of fuel!! Chapman would never have more than the odd extra ounce of fuel in and Clark’s absolutely masterful effort, he was obviously going ‘Harry Flatters’ everywhere, all the time, and he used more fuel than he would have done normally, in catching up this lap and a half. Absolutely brilliant, a brilliant performance."

On how the DFV was almost culled due to vibration problems and his legacy continuing in modern F1 engines:

"The engine was nearly abandoned. It was getting almost impossible to run and it was at that stage that I designed the quilled hub, that has some elasticity and damping. It went in the middle of the V8 where the cam drive split and that rescued the whole of the valve gear and it carried on. I might point out that all gear-driven F1 engines, I’m fairly certain by now, embody a fairly similar piece of kit. The Renault certainly does. In fact there is somebody who has made a fairly substantial living out of redesigning my quilled hub to suit other people’s engines!!!"

On the current breed of F1 cars:

"The thing I don’t like is the current situation of the cars dragging their bottoms on the ground and you not being able to have suspension. Because I think all road cars will need suspension. Ground effect is probably quite sensible for road cars, but, as you’ve got to have a minimum of 3 inches ground clearance to cater for the bumps on the roads, I think you’ve got to make ground effect that will work with three inches."

I think I'll leave the last word to Mike Costin, who - speaking seven years ago, when they were still working on projects together - summed up their relationship a little modestly and made clear the high esteem in which he held Keith:

"Keith is the dictator and I do what I’m told!! I don’t say that in any other way than I’m quite happy for him to be the dictator because anybody who is that good, why try and change it? I still think that, of all the engineers that I’ve ever met, having spoken to them, discussed things with them and seen the way they think, I still haven’t met anybody better than Keith. I never met Barnes Wallis or people like that, but I doubt if they were any better."

Smashing Michael, many thanks.

Wonderful stuff Michael, many thanks. Pure Duckworth logic.

Michael, upon learning of the loss of Keith Duckworth, I pulled my copy of "Lotus 49" off of the shelf and re-read (for likely the 500th time) most of the passages you so kindly shared here on TNF.

In reading those familiar pages yet again, it was my very small way of paying homage to the design genius that Keith surely was.

Thanks.

Seeing that this great man has died, I thought it would be a suitable epitaph here to hear of TNF's memories of the man and the engine he designed. I am personally saddened, because his engine helped propell JYS to WCC victory, Tyrell was my child hood favourite team. I didn't know the man but I mourn his passing

This week has been spent working 16hr days, and this is the first I've heard... Such terribly sad news...

When I think of racing in just about any era, the first sound that comes into my head is that of a DFV on full tilt...

Reminds me to dig out "Nine days in summer" as I haven't watched it for a while.

Thanks for the memories Keith - your contribution towards engine design must be without peer

Justin

Originally posted by philhitchings

Seeing that this great man has died, I thought it would be a suitable epitaph here to hear of TNF's memories of the man and the engine he designed.

Roger has asked me to pass on that a memorial website was launched today in order to honour his late father, and allow his many admirers to pay their tributes to the great man.

Please visit the site and leave your Keith Duckworth memories and messages (as well as recording them here, naturally).

It's also possible to read other visitors' messages, which already includes a few words from Vic Elford. Details of the memorial service and a collation of obituaries and tributes are present too.

Originally posted by Twin Window
Please visit the site and leave your Keith Duckworth memories and messages (as well as recording them here, naturally).

It's very nicely done...

Some wonderful memories of Keith appearing there - Ben Rood, Frank Dernie and Graham Robson in particular.

Such is the loss of my interest in racing of late, i'm ashamed to say that I just an hour ago clicked on CosworthRacing.com as I hadn't visited the site in quite some time, and the news had to be right up front on the homepage. Not a great way for me to enter the new year. Changed the course of F1 somewhat, didn't he?
Siiiggghhh...

The Memorial Service for the late KEITH DUCKWORTH O.B.E. will be held on Thursday 23rd February 2006 at 3.00pm at All Saints' Church George Row, Northampton, England.

Location and car park details can be found on: www.allsaintsnorthampton.co.uk

A year or two ago I asked one of the better known people on TNF if he could give me Keith's phone number. He said he had the number, but didn't like to give it to me without permission....but he would ask.

About fifteen minutes later the phone rang. I answered it with my "Ready to Deal with an Unwanted Phone Sales Call" voice.

"Is that David Beard".

"Yes"

"Keith Duckworth speaking"

I said something like...."good heavens, is it really?"

We chatted for about half an hour....about things like how he would have increased the width of gear teeth by one tenth of an inch, if Chapman would have let him. Then it might have worked.

It was half an hour I won't forget in a hurry......just wonderful.

Interesting and long article just gone up about Keith's last few days:

http://www.f1i.com/c...nt/view/2947/1/

Info on Keith was very thin - now some journo' should do a proper biography of him. The Chapman, Clark, Lotus 49 years alone would surely fill up one volume..... :

Originally posted by Cargo
Interesting and long article just gone up about Keith's last few days:

http://www.f1i.com/c...nt/view/2947/1/

Info on Keith was very thin - now some journo' should do a proper biography of him. The Chapman, Clark, Lotus 49 years alone would surely fill up one volume..... :

That's by far the best thing I've ever read by Rubython.

Have you read Graham Robson's Cosworth: The Search For Power? -- it's as near to being a Duckworth biography as you'll find at the moment.

Originally posted by Cargo
Interesting and long article just gone up about Keith's last few days:

http://www.f1i.com/c...nt/view/2947/1/

Well worth a read. Very heavy on the personal side...I'm not sure I need to know all that, but the writer obviously had some close contact.

I don't remember hearing before that KD had an interest in the Hobbs transmission.....

Originally posted by petefenelon



That's by far the best thing I've ever read by Rubython.

Have you read Graham Robson's Cosworth: The Search For Power? -- it's as near to being a Duckworth biography as you'll find at the moment.

Yes, I have - I've also read Sound of Thunder and a book/pamphlet about Coswoth by Ken Wells.

What I meant was, that once KD retired - he simply dissapeared off the radar as far as motorsport press was concerned. I have not kept up to speed with the F1 glossies in recent years, but I often browsed them and would buy issues with long technical content. But not once did I spot an article featuring KD's input. I would love to have known what he thought about the new tech stuff in engines - pneumatic valves, beryllium, etc etc. But I never saw anything in print. A pity.