No, in general engines doesn't blow up in because of heat. At McLaren I can only recall one engine failure due to heat, and that was when Montoya damaged one of the sidepods which restricted cooling airflow. Quality control of the engine components was a bigger issue, there were coatings that failed, incorrect tolerances for the dry sump pump and so on that caused most of the failures.
At Red Bull the Renault engine runs at the same temperature as at Renault so that isn't the reason for the engine troubles.
In F1 the engine is part of the load bearing structures of the chassis, unlike in most other cars where the engine just rests on it's stands. In F1 car the engine twists and bends just like any other load bearing chassis component. Although Mercedes surely made mistakes as well, problems with Renault engine clearly suggest that
Newey has something to do with the problems. MacLaren-Mercedes problems were so persistent, that the origin of the problem must have been difficult to pinpoint, suggesting a combination of internal engine weaknessess combined with weaknesses in suspending the engine to the chassis.
Another coincidence is that his last title is from 1999 and even then his cars had huge reliability disadvantage compared with it's closest rival. And frankly I can't remember any other designer that has produced such a POS that it couldn't even be introduced for the season it was intended - MP4-18 anyone?
I do give credit to his achievements in the mid 90s, where he more often than not did a fine job, but since then he's apparently been repeating the same mistakes over and over and hence has become so overrated that it's annoying.
Edited by Big Block 8, 09 October 2009 - 06:54.