How many of you have witnessed a wheel dynamometer test? This is where you drive the entire car onto a set of rollers, wire up the engine and the technician “drives” your car at speed through the gears and logs the power and torque coming from the engine through to the rear wheels (or front wheels if it is an FWD car).

It is actually quite frightening as the car has to be chained down onto the rollers as it wants to climb up and out, and if it does so, it comes off the rollers at 60 kph plus and out through the back door of the tune-up shop! Don’t laugh, it happened to a friend of mine in Oz.

The bike boys have also worked out that dyno testing pays dividends, and have designed rolling road dynamometers for bikes too, and no, they don’t sit on them while testing!

The other type of dynamometer is called an “engine” dyno, and that is where they take just the engine and hook it up to water, electrics and a torque tube and measure the power and torque, directly at the flywheel.

These are again very frightening to watch, as the exhaust pipes glow cherry red to orange in colour and the noise is indescribable. The techo chap sits outside the room where the engine is hooked up and watches through the double glazed windows. And yes, more than one engine has thrown a leg out of bed during testing (race parlance for breaking a con-rod).

Now for testing F1 engines, you take the whole dyno situation to the ultimate, the technician can actually “drive” the engine through a lap of the different GP circuits, as a computer simulates the amount of throttle and load experienced as the car would be going around the circuit, complete with gear changes, the works. And you can imagine the scream of an engine on test at 17,000 rpm!

This part of race car engine testing is so important, that the manufacturers spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on doing it. Interestingly, the British race engine manufacturer Cosworth used to have to send its race engines to the US, to use Ford’s facilities over there, but that has now changed with Cosworth Racing unveiling its new state-of-the-art dynamometer facility at Northampton, UK.

In a statement released by Cosworth Racing’s Nick Hayes, “Until these dyno facilities became available, Cosworth was really trailing the capabilities of our leading competition in the very important area of transient testing.”

“We now have access to facilities that allow us to get closer to the conditions seen in the car. The end result will be better transient behaviour of the engine in the car and finer resolution of small changes with high levels of confidence of the results. In short, this facility gives us a big step forward for Cosworth Racing’s F1 engine development capabilities.”

In 2003 Cosworth is supplying its race engines to Jaguar, Jordan and Minardi. For Jordan and Minardi, this has to be a step forwards; last year Jordan had the exploding hand grenade Honda units, while Minardi had the underpowered ancient Asiatech engines. The Cosworths were used in 2002 by Jaguar and Arrows, with the latter now bankrupt and (I believe) still owing several million dollars to Cosworth Racing.

Cosworth is famous for the DFV race engines in F1, the ‘winningest’ engine of all time. I ran a BDG Cosworth engine in one of my sports sedans in Australia and the engine and service from the Cosworth organization was incredible. Imagine getting a personal letter with the new piston sent urgently from the factory, hoping that the engine will be finished on time and that we get a good result. For that reason alone, I want the Cosworth engine cars to do well this year.

The Grid for the 2003 F1 season