The most legendary engines ever built. The ones that changed everything. Welcome to the Engine’s Syndicate.
Freevalve: the camless engine, told properly Let’s get something out of the way before we go any further, because nearly every English-language piece on this engine starts with the same lie. Koenigsegg did not invent the camless engine. They are not the first to try it. The idea of binning the camshaft and operating valves … Read more
Colombo V12: The V12 Drawn on a Garden Table That Stayed Inside a Ferrari for Forty-Two Years Some engines get designed in proper engineering departments. Glass-walled offices, slide rules, scheduled meetings, espresso machines, the lot. And then there’s this other one, which was sketched in pencil in Milan, in August nineteen forty-five, while Italy was … Read more
Aramco’s hybrid engine is a masterpiece. It’s also a trap. You don’t expect this kind of news from Saudi Aramco. You expect it from Toyota. From Honda. From some stealth outfit in Stuttgart with a whiteboard full of equations. You don’t expect the world’s largest oil producer to walk into Detroit, hire a French race-engine … Read more
Hot Vapor: The Engine a Mechanic With No Degree Built in 1984 Was the HCCI Mazda Spent 35 More Years Trying to Mass-Produce Daytona Beach, Florida. 1984. Behind the back door of the workshop Smokey Yunick called The Best Damn Garage in Town, a Pontiac Fiero sits up on jack stands. Under the engine cover … Read more
Maserati cooked its own engine, regulations took the heat out Some engines explain themselves. Others hit you. The Nettuno does the first better than almost anything else alive. The second — no. And that’s exactly what you need to know before someone sells it to you as the future of Maserati. Because the future is … Read more
Ford Boss 302 vs Boss 429: Ford Built Two Race Engines for Two Different Wars. And Won Both. In 1969, Ford presented the world with two of the most radical engines it had ever installed in a road car. Both carried the “Boss” name. Both lived in the Mustang. Both existed for reasons that had … Read more
The 428 Cobra Jet: The Engine Ford Invented Because of a Rebel Dealer Some engines are born in high-tech engineering labs. Some are the result of years of strategic planning and multi-million dollar budgets. And then there are engines born because a dealer in Rhode Island got tired of watching his Mustangs lose at stoplights … Read more
The Subaru Boxer Engine: Not Too Reliable, But Tremendously Effective Some engines earn your respect through their reliability. Some earn it through their performance. And then there’s the Subaru boxer, which earns your respect despite everything, because what it does well, it does so extraordinarily well that you forgive everything else. Subaru’s horizontally-opposed engine — … Read more
PSA XUD: The Indestructible Atmospheric Diesel That Moved an Entire Continent If any engine deserves the title “workhorse of Europe,” it’s the PSA XUD. It wasn’t glamorous. It wasn’t powerful. It had no turbo, no sophisticated electronic injection, nothing that could be considered remotely exciting. But it had something worth more than all of that … Read more
Ferrari’s Flat V12 Engines: Why They Howl and Why Nothing Else Sounds the Same Some sounds are burned into memory forever. The rumble of an American V8 at idle. The shriek of a Japanese four-cylinder at 9,000 rpm. But no mechanical sound in automotive history comes close to the supernatural howl of a Ferrari horizontally-opposed … Read more
The BMW M57D30: The Diesel That Silenced the Sceptics In a world where “diesel” and “excitement” rarely share a sentence, BMW built an engine that defied every prejudice. The M57D30, the inline-six turbodiesel that powered the E46 330d among other applications, didn’t just prove that a diesel could be refined and powerful. It proved that … Read more
The Toyota 2JZ-GTE: The Legend That Earned Its Throne on Boost There are good engines. There are reliable engines. There are powerful engines. And then there’s the 2JZ-GTE. The engine that turned the Toyota Supra into an immortal icon, humiliated supercars on workshop budgets, and two decades later remains the absolute reference when discussing tuneable … Read more
