R.I.P Keith Duckworth
19-12-2005 | 09:45 PM
#1
Thread Starter
590 BHP/Ton
Joined: May 2004
Posts: 1,670
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From: Haverhill,suffolk
R.I.P Keith Duckworth
Heard tonight that Keith Duckworth has sadly passed away.
Keith was the 'worth' in Cosworth and he along with Mike Costin formed the now famous Cosworth Marque.
He was a truly talented engineer and a thourougly decent chap.
RIP keith...
Keith was the 'worth' in Cosworth and he along with Mike Costin formed the now famous Cosworth Marque.
He was a truly talented engineer and a thourougly decent chap.
RIP keith...
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19-12-2005 | 09:52 PM
#12
Thread Starter
590 BHP/Ton
Joined: May 2004
Posts: 1,670
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From: Haverhill,suffolk
I had the good fortune to meet him a few times.
He came over one day in his sapphire cosworth.
We were chatting outside for a while and he ended up driving off with his briefcase on the roof...
I grabbed it and got in my car and gave chase but could not catch him!..
He returned that evening in his helicopter to collect the case!
He came over one day in his sapphire cosworth.
We were chatting outside for a while and he ended up driving off with his briefcase on the roof...
I grabbed it and got in my car and gave chase but could not catch him!..
He returned that evening in his helicopter to collect the case!
19-12-2005 | 09:54 PM
#14
15K+ Super Poster!!
Joined: May 2003
Posts: 15,885
Likes: 17
From: Stockport, Cheshire
He died Last night 
That is terrible news - i really would have like to have met him
Found this on a newsgroup:
One of my heroes died last night. Keith Duckworth passed away at the
age of 72. Difficult to sum him up in a few words, but how does "the
greatest racing engine designer ever" sound?
Keith grew up tinkering with machinery, and after national service in
the RAF, he ended up at Imperial College studying mechanical
engineering. He managed to convince IC that a placement at Lotus (then
in North London) was suitable work experience, and after graduating
joined them as 'transmission development engineer' - trying to make
Colin Chapman's "queerbox" work.
At Lotus he met Mike Costin (then Technical Director), and the two of
them decided that there was a better living to be made "messing around
with racing cars and engines". Mike was tied to Lotus for several
years, so Keith started building engines on his own...
Ford-Cosworth engines based on the Ford Anglia unit powered many
successful Formula Junior cars in the early Sixties, going on to
dominate Formula Three.
When the three-litre Formula One was announced for 1966, Lotus were left
without an engine -- Colin Chapman squeezed Ł100,000 out of Walter Hayes
and introduced him to Keith. The resultant family of engines would go
on to dominate racing for two decades.
Keith designed two engines - the 1600cc FVA (Four Valve, Series A) for
Formula Two and as a proof of concept - this was his narrow-angle
four-valve head on a Cortina block. The DFV ("Double Four Valve") was
"doubled up" with two similar heads on a custom-built Cosworth block
and crankcase. It was Keith's first complete engine. It broke a lot of
new ground - designed to be used as a stressed part of the chassis
(Lancia had experimented with this before), compact, light, and more
powerful at about 410bhp than anything else in F1 at the time. It won
first time out, with Jim Clark in the Lotus 49 at Zandvoort. Rather
than keeping it exclusive, Hayes, Chapman and Duckworth were astute
enough to know that the engine should be available to everyone... and
before long it became standard equipment everywhere.
And it kept winning. The DFV won 155 Grands Prix, against opposition
from many other manufacturers - initially Repco, BRM, Honda, Maserati,
Ferrari, Matra... gradually driving many of these out of F1 until the
grids were 90% Cosworth.
The house that Keith (and Mike) built continued to prosper - the DFV
was turned into an endurance sports car racing engine; a derivative of
the DFV (the turbocharged DFX) became the engine to have in Indy
racing in the States; the FVA's "BD" (Belt Drive) descendents were
successful in many categories of racing and rallying... and Cosworth
started to consult for the world's motor industry on both advanced
foundry techniques and engine design. The company expanded from a pure
racing engine outfit to a small-volume manufacturing facility for
advanced engines... and finally took Ford into F1 with a turbo-V6 in
the mid-80s (despite the fact that Keith was sure that turbos were
illegal -- he claimed that they were effectively a gas-turbine coupled
to an internal combustion engine and that two engines were illegal!)
Characteristically, Keith's turbo was one of the most powerful around,
but the teams Ford placed the engine with weren't competitive and as
the turbo formula wound down it never won a race.... and when
normally-aspirated F1 came back, it was to a derivative of the
20-year-old DFV that most of the grid turned!
Keith started to leave the business in the late 80s, becoming Life
President, and still keeping his hand in with racing engines.
But he was more than just an engineer - Keith was known throughout
racing and industry for his "Duckworthisms". Some of them are such
pithy engineering maxims that it's worth repeating a selection below.
* It is better to be uninformed than ill-informed.
* Development is only necessary to rectify the ignorance of designers.
* If you're telling the truth, it's simple. If you're lying, you have to
remember what yesterday's lie was. It's safer to be honest.
(I suspect this was about Colin Chapman, who used to lie pretty much for fun!)
* Academics are seldom any use at engineering. One must have a mistrust
of theorists.
* First ideas usually turn out to be complicated.
* In engineering there is an answer to everything. It's just that
we're usually too ignorant, or too dim, to see it.
* It costs you very little to scrub out drawings on paper, and to
start again. As soon as you have things in the metal, where you're
fighting to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, that's hopeless.
* A genius can make for penny what a good engineer can only make for
two bob.
* I think that borrowing money is the biggest immorality that there is.
* As far as I can see, in a large company the last thing you can
afford to do is not to start replying immediately a question is
asked.
* One of the things that I have often done wrong was to stop
projects at stages of development, because we couldn't afford to
produce triumphs of development over design.
* To my thinking, turbochargers in Formula 1 engines were always
expressly against the rules.
* One of my principles is that young fools go on to become old
fools.
* Inherently, by nature, I'm one of those people who'd rather do a
few things very well then what I see as the other extreme, which
is to make a nonesense of lots of things.
* I used to think that thinking ability is the important factor in
life, rather than having a good memory. It wasn't until later that
I realised I'd also been gifted with what appears to be a very
good memory too - and I hadn't realised the advantages of that.
How can people ever learn from their experiences if they've
already forgotten what they were?
I'll let Keith leave his own epitaph:
* 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.
David Keith Duckworth, 1933-2005. RIP. The racing world is smalller
now he's gone.
That is terrible news - i really would have like to have met him
Found this on a newsgroup:
One of my heroes died last night. Keith Duckworth passed away at the
age of 72. Difficult to sum him up in a few words, but how does "the
greatest racing engine designer ever" sound?
Keith grew up tinkering with machinery, and after national service in
the RAF, he ended up at Imperial College studying mechanical
engineering. He managed to convince IC that a placement at Lotus (then
in North London) was suitable work experience, and after graduating
joined them as 'transmission development engineer' - trying to make
Colin Chapman's "queerbox" work.
At Lotus he met Mike Costin (then Technical Director), and the two of
them decided that there was a better living to be made "messing around
with racing cars and engines". Mike was tied to Lotus for several
years, so Keith started building engines on his own...
Ford-Cosworth engines based on the Ford Anglia unit powered many
successful Formula Junior cars in the early Sixties, going on to
dominate Formula Three.
When the three-litre Formula One was announced for 1966, Lotus were left
without an engine -- Colin Chapman squeezed Ł100,000 out of Walter Hayes
and introduced him to Keith. The resultant family of engines would go
on to dominate racing for two decades.
Keith designed two engines - the 1600cc FVA (Four Valve, Series A) for
Formula Two and as a proof of concept - this was his narrow-angle
four-valve head on a Cortina block. The DFV ("Double Four Valve") was
"doubled up" with two similar heads on a custom-built Cosworth block
and crankcase. It was Keith's first complete engine. It broke a lot of
new ground - designed to be used as a stressed part of the chassis
(Lancia had experimented with this before), compact, light, and more
powerful at about 410bhp than anything else in F1 at the time. It won
first time out, with Jim Clark in the Lotus 49 at Zandvoort. Rather
than keeping it exclusive, Hayes, Chapman and Duckworth were astute
enough to know that the engine should be available to everyone... and
before long it became standard equipment everywhere.
And it kept winning. The DFV won 155 Grands Prix, against opposition
from many other manufacturers - initially Repco, BRM, Honda, Maserati,
Ferrari, Matra... gradually driving many of these out of F1 until the
grids were 90% Cosworth.
The house that Keith (and Mike) built continued to prosper - the DFV
was turned into an endurance sports car racing engine; a derivative of
the DFV (the turbocharged DFX) became the engine to have in Indy
racing in the States; the FVA's "BD" (Belt Drive) descendents were
successful in many categories of racing and rallying... and Cosworth
started to consult for the world's motor industry on both advanced
foundry techniques and engine design. The company expanded from a pure
racing engine outfit to a small-volume manufacturing facility for
advanced engines... and finally took Ford into F1 with a turbo-V6 in
the mid-80s (despite the fact that Keith was sure that turbos were
illegal -- he claimed that they were effectively a gas-turbine coupled
to an internal combustion engine and that two engines were illegal!)
Characteristically, Keith's turbo was one of the most powerful around,
but the teams Ford placed the engine with weren't competitive and as
the turbo formula wound down it never won a race.... and when
normally-aspirated F1 came back, it was to a derivative of the
20-year-old DFV that most of the grid turned!
Keith started to leave the business in the late 80s, becoming Life
President, and still keeping his hand in with racing engines.
But he was more than just an engineer - Keith was known throughout
racing and industry for his "Duckworthisms". Some of them are such
pithy engineering maxims that it's worth repeating a selection below.
* It is better to be uninformed than ill-informed.
* Development is only necessary to rectify the ignorance of designers.
* If you're telling the truth, it's simple. If you're lying, you have to
remember what yesterday's lie was. It's safer to be honest.
(I suspect this was about Colin Chapman, who used to lie pretty much for fun!)
* Academics are seldom any use at engineering. One must have a mistrust
of theorists.
* First ideas usually turn out to be complicated.
* In engineering there is an answer to everything. It's just that
we're usually too ignorant, or too dim, to see it.
* It costs you very little to scrub out drawings on paper, and to
start again. As soon as you have things in the metal, where you're
fighting to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, that's hopeless.
* A genius can make for penny what a good engineer can only make for
two bob.
* I think that borrowing money is the biggest immorality that there is.
* As far as I can see, in a large company the last thing you can
afford to do is not to start replying immediately a question is
asked.
* One of the things that I have often done wrong was to stop
projects at stages of development, because we couldn't afford to
produce triumphs of development over design.
* To my thinking, turbochargers in Formula 1 engines were always
expressly against the rules.
* One of my principles is that young fools go on to become old
fools.
* Inherently, by nature, I'm one of those people who'd rather do a
few things very well then what I see as the other extreme, which
is to make a nonesense of lots of things.
* I used to think that thinking ability is the important factor in
life, rather than having a good memory. It wasn't until later that
I realised I'd also been gifted with what appears to be a very
good memory too - and I hadn't realised the advantages of that.
How can people ever learn from their experiences if they've
already forgotten what they were?
I'll let Keith leave his own epitaph:
* 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.
David Keith Duckworth, 1933-2005. RIP. The racing world is smalller
now he's gone.
19-12-2005 | 10:13 PM
#28
PassionFord Post Whore!!
Joined: Aug 2004
Posts: 4,574
Likes: 0
From: Chesterfield
I first met him at a car stereo shop in Stoke in 1995 and didn't know it was him. I had a Corsa GSI at the time and was talking to the alarm installer about an article in CCC about how detuned the GSI motor was when this old grey haired chap came over and joined the conversation and I thought he must have read the same article. Later on the shop owner informed me it was Keith Duckworth!
He was a gentleman and true enthusiast.
R.I.P.
He was a gentleman and true enthusiast.
R.I.P.
19-12-2005 | 10:46 PM
#40
Too many posts.. I need a life!!
Joined: May 2004
Posts: 788
Likes: 4
From: shropshire
The man is and was a inspiration to me, the way his Engineering thoughts are, the way he stopped reading books on how to get the right cam for a engine and juts went with what he thought would be right.
R.I.P
R.I.P