Patrick am I correct in thinking, and do you have any information about, that there was unbadged Ilmor in 2001 powering the Arciero-Blair car? Would it be over-simplified to think of that as 'just' a previous year's Mercedes-Ilmor continued on as a customer deal? I remember it running at the front for a lot of laps at Cleveland that year, after admittedly a jumbled starting order.
The so called Phoenix engine - my Dad came up with that name, I told him I thought it was awful but he liked it! - was very much the 2000 108F. By mid 2000 the teams, Nunn racing more than the others, got extremely vocal about the drivability of the engine. Their specific complaints were that when on throttle the power delivery was such that, in TK's words, you got "nothing.... nothing.... TOO MUCH!". They also complained that when you dropped throttle, particularly on an oval, the resulting boost spike would destabilise the rear of the car. Many of us, myself included, felt that curing the latter was not as important as the former and that it was unlikely to produce much by way of lap time improvement. Steve Miller however took a different view - possibly to pacify what was becoming something of a mob - and a lot of work was done with the 9th butterfly to cure the boost spike within the rules which were quite hard to work around. Most of the development department were tasked with fixing this issue along side mapping the new TAG stream injectors we'ed gone over to after we discovered our previous suppliers injectors could stick open if you squeezed the boot the wire ran from....
The upshot of all this was that quietly in the background Ian Prosser was tasked to design a new cylinder head with a barrel throttle in an effort to make the power delivery more linear with throttle angle. Initially this was billed as the 2001 engine which would have been IC108G. Towards the end of the season there was suddenly a panic to get the new head on to a track. My guess is (and this is pure speculation but would seem to fit the facts) that this was the point when Mercedes decided they did not want to continue beyond the end of the year so the engine needed to get to the track while funding was still available. It definitely ran with the barrel throttle on a dyno somewhere - I think it was dyno 901 at Stuttgart. I remember being shown the torque curves at different throttle angles and from memory they looked like a big improvement over the butterflies. Whether it would have been much of an improvement on the track I don't know.
One engine was shipped to Ilmor Inc. built up ready for track test. It was all pretty exciting and Paul Ray was very keen to get it race worthy before the end of the season. I don't recall why and I don't think we were ever told but that engine was pulled out of the test with less than a week to go. So the 108F continued in an unaltered state into 2001. Michael Krumm did lead one race - much to our amazement. If I recall correctly it was wet and I think we all sat there saying "having less power than anyone else can't be too bad in the wet!!".
A lot changed at Inc. at the end of 2000, there were redundancies which was a first for Ilmor and extremely painful. There was also some redeployment and some leavers, including Jens who was mentioned earlier. A little group was put together to work on the Aurora IRL engine in which I was lucky enough to be included. That engine was agricultural in the extreme but developing it was the most fun I had in proper front line motorsport. Where in 1998 - 2000 everything seemed to go wrong it all came together and every new part worked, made power and was reliable. Tony Sime, who designed the latest Chevy engine, designed a crank, rod and piston package which worked first time out and made plenty of power, Steve Miller came up with a really wild scheme for the fuel injection which we all though was nuts. The really wizzy bit was designed in england and I designed the supporting inlet parts. Quite by accident - as in I messed up - I discovered that while every other engine builder was trying to make the inlet runners bigger in area what the engine actually wanted was smaller i.e. increased velocity. We built that into the new injection package.
I vividly remember sitting with three collages in the Nassau Bar and grill across the road the night before we ran that system. We all took bets on what it would do. One chap, every the optimist said 15BHP, I said 8, another said 3 and the last threw in -8 just for fun. The following morning we all sat with mouths wide open as with no mapping at all it made 25BHP straight off. It was massively exciting, one of those throw your hat in the air moments.
Edited by Patrick Morgan, 10 August 2012 - 08:27.