About this design
Keith Duckworth t shirt
The name of his most famous engine, Cosworth DFV, could not be less ostentatious, DFV stands for Double Four Valve a simple empirical description of said engine. Cosworth is a simple amalgamation of the surnames of Mike Costin and Keith Duckworth.
The DFV is and was without peer in the history of F1 – it was both cheap, approximately £7500 when it was introduced in 1967, light, compact and reliable. It powered Jim Clark and Graham Hill to 1st and 2nd places respectively on its debut at Zandvoort. It went on to win 155 Grand Prix, the first in '67 with Jim Clark at Zandvoort the last in a car driven by Michele Alboreto in a Tyrrell at Detroit in 1983. The only other engine manufacturer with more wins is Ferrari but in their case with many different varieties of engine.
I am no engineer but one Duckworth innovation incorporated into the DFV I can understand. Aluminum heads and blocks need to be carefully engineered and jointed one to the other to avoid head gasket problems. With this potential weakness in mind the block/head interface is routinely heavily over engineered. Keith Duckworth's take on this was simple, cheap, light, original and very effective. The normal way a head is joined to a block is with bolted studs arranged perpendicular to the block and head, carefully torqued into place to produce even pressure on the block and head. Duckworth introduced studs at an angle to head and block such that when torqued into place they produced a horizontal vector to the forces between head and block. Instantly less material was used – cheaper, lighter, less force/torque, more reliability. Simple genius. Formula 1 would not be what it is today with out Keith Duckworth. David Keith Duckworth, (August 10, 1933 – December 19, 2005). Celebrate and admire a great British engineer, wear our Keith Duckworth DFV8 T shirt.