I have always given great importance to the engine and much less to the chassis,” said Enzo Ferrari in the early 1960s, “endeavoring to squeeze out as much power as possible in the conviction that it is engine power that is—not 50 percent but 80 percent—responsible for success on the track.”

Ferrari’s passion for engines resulted in road and racing cars with novel and exciting power units of bewildering variety. One reason for this, wrote historian Gianni Rogliatti, was that Enzo Ferrari was “extremely open to all the proposals put forward by those who worked with him and was willing to test anything that could reasonably be tested. This enabled the company to accumulate enough experimental and statistical data to make any of the large car manufacturers green with envy.”

Another reason was that Enzo put his designers under constant pressure to innovate in all aspects of engine design, from concepts to materials and systems. And as we shall see, they responded with phenomenal creativity.

1950s

Inlet tuning with advanced carburetion

From the early 1920s through the 1930s, all first-rank Grand Prix cars were supercharged. After World War II, rules changes gave normally aspirated engines a significant displacement advantage over their blown counterparts. However, to make the most of normal aspiration, the old, contorted intake manifolds with carburetors perched here and there were no longer fit for the purpose. New lessons had to be learned.

Between the wars, a few pioneers, such as Harry Miller in the United States and Freddie Dixon in Great Britain, extracted more power from unsupercharged engines through careful tuning of the inlet and exhaust tracts. They took advantage of the natural resonance that occurs in these tracts to create an over-pressure at the right moment, forcing maximum filling of the combustion chamber with the fresh fuel/air mixture.

To achieve this ram effect, each inlet passage had to have its own separate porting and fueling, and also had to be as straight as possible, aimed at the back of the inlet valve. While Ferrari’s first unblown Grand Prix engine, the 4.5-liter 375 F1, featured dedicated inlet tracts for each cylinder by 1952 (at least in its Indianapolis version), these passages were anything but straight—there just wasn’t enough room between the V12’s cylinder banks.

When designer Aurelio Lampredi sat down at his drawing board to create a normally aspirated four-cylinder engine for the 2-liter Formula 2 (which would be the World Championship class for 1952 and ’53), he knew this issue had to be addressed. But if the layout of straight, ram-tuned inlets could be sorted on paper, Lampredi’s engine also had specific fuel delivery requirements if it was to reach its full potential.

Luckily, Enzo Ferrari had a close relationship with Edoardo Weber’s carburetor firm in Bologna, having worked with it before the war to develop special carburetors for his supercharged Alfa Romeo competition cars. Ferrari and Weber cooperated closely in the development of a sophisticated carburetor which featured throat spacing matched to the new four.

Specifically, Weber built a horizontal carburetor that combined two straight-through throats with a single central float chamber. One special feature of the design was an auxiliary central venturi that pre-emulsified the fuel/air mixture before it reached the main venturi. The main jet assemblies were completely surrounded by the float chambers, assuring a good supply of fuel under braking, cornering and acceleration. Under full-throttle conditions, the accelerator-pump circuits took on an added high-speed-jet function.

The twin-throat Weber 50DCO carb made its first public appearance on September 2, 1951 in a non-championship Grand Prix at Bari, Italy. Two of them were used to feed Ferrari’s new four-cylinder engine, which debuted as a 2.5-liter unit.

With their large 50mm throats, these first Ferrari-specific Webers weren’t suited to a smaller engine. So, when the smaller-diameter carburetors needed to feed the 2.0-liter version for Formula 2 weren’t ready at the beginning of 1952, Weber provided four individual 45DOE carbs, each 45-mm throat feeding an individual cylinder. These were used through much of the 500 F2’s successful racing career.

Others would capitalize on the pioneering work on advanced carburetion carried out by Ferrari and Weber. But thanks to its early exploitation of these principles, Ferrari enjoyed a carburetor advantage until fuel injection became the norm in the mid-1960s.