[Le Mans, France – 3:42 PM, 21st of June, 1924]
I was trying very, very hard not to laugh at the expression on Kitty's face.
She was furious.
Not loudly furious, either. That would have been easier to deal with. No, this was the quiet sort. The kind where she sat perfectly still, jaw clenched, eyes narrowed at the track, and radiated enough barely-contained irritation to make me reconsider sitting within arm's reach of her.
I knew that look.
I'd seen it before.
Several times, actually.
Ever since I'd made the mistake of telling her what cars would eventually become, she'd been fascinated by the possibilities. Things that, to me, were perfectly ordinary developments of automotive technology, to her, sounded like something out of science fiction.
And, naturally, she'd wanted one.
A bloody F1 car.
Then she'd start asking when I was going to build it.
I'd explained repeatedly that it wasn't exactly simple.
Knowing the rough concepts behind innovations outside of my field of expertise and actually having the tools, materials, manufacturing techniques and engineering knowledge to do it were two very different things.
Apparently, Kitty had decided that distinction was merely an inconvenience to her obsession.
She watched another Bentley roar past in a victory lap.
Her expression darkened.
I followed her gaze.
"Yeah," I muttered. There was something almost offensive about how effortlessly they seemed to pull away from everyone else, though I knew how much work they had put in even if I didn't know the details.
Of course, they'd gone on to win Le Mans in 1924.
It had been expected.
They had the money, the engineering, the experience and an actual racing programme behind them.
We had a stock car that she'd already spent far too much time modifying.
I leaned back in my seat.
"It's not that bad."
Kitty looked at me.
"It is."
She folded her arms.
"You told me cars in the future are way better than this."
I hesitated.
"Yes."
She stared at me.
I could practically see the question forming.
"So…"
"No." I firmly replied.
"I haven't even asked anything."
"You don't need to." I said sarcastically
Her eyes narrowed.
"What if you built me a better car?"
I sighed.
"Kitty…"
"You said yourself there are things we could do."
"There are."
"Then why haven't we done them?"
"Because doing them properly is difficult, and we can't just make the car faster; it's dangerous already, and the faster you go, the more dangerous it gets..."
She frowned.
"...so that would mean we'd have to completely rebuild the car…add in dozens of safety features so that when…not if…you lose control of the car, you survive."
Her eyes narrowed thoughtfully.
I knew that look, too.
This was the problem with telling Kitty about the future.
She didn't hear this is what technology will eventually achieve.
She heard this is what you could build for me.
She looked back towards the track.
"Build me one."
I blinked.
"I know you've told me it's difficult."
"Because it is," I replied courteously.
"But it's possible."
I paused.
That was the irritating part.
She wasn't wrong.
It was possible.
Not easy. Not cheap. Not quick. But possible.
There were plenty of things I could do. I looked at her.
She was still staring at the track.
And despite myself, I smiled.
"Fine."
Her head snapped towards me.
"Fine?"
"Fine."
"You'll build me a car?"
Kitty's grin only widened. I already regretted this. And I hadn't even started designing the damn thing.
[Brooklands, England – 1:03PM, 3rd of October, 1924]
I chose Brooklands for much the same reason you might choose a laboratory for a scientific experiment: everything we needed was already there. It was Britain's quickly sprouting centre of motor racing, with a permanent circuit, workshops, garages, mechanics, engineers, suppliers and, perhaps most importantly, a community of people who understood what we were trying to accomplish.
We could test a car at speed without having to wait for a race meeting or find some stretch of road suitable for experiments, and we could make a modification in the workshop in the morning and have it running around the circuit that afternoon.
Its location in Surrey also put us close enough to London to make recruiting talent and obtaining materials considerably easier. More than that, Brooklands had a reputation for attracting people who were fascinated by what automobiles could become, and that was precisely the sort of environment I wanted.
Watching a team of some of the world's greatest automotive engineers work together was truly something extraordinary.
Even if, admittedly, about half of what they were casually chatted about required me to actively pay attention.
I had thrown enough money at the problem to assemble a rather ridiculous collection of talent: John Duff, Frank Clement, Clive Gallop, J. G. Perry-Thomas, Major Frank Halford, and Henry Wessex.
Getting them all into the same room had been its own engineering problem.
It had taken quite a lot of money to convince some of them to leave the places they were already working, but money wasn't the only thing that had persuaded them. Once they realised I was essentially giving them a blank cheque to experiment with the things they were actually passionate about it; their enthusiasm became considerably easier to understand.
There had been some hesitation about working with Kitty initially.
I couldn't exactly blame them.
She was a woman trying to compete in a field almost entirely dominated by men, and I suspected some of them had initially assumed she was there because of me rather than because she actually knew what she was doing.
I found sexism incredibly irritating.
Thankfully, a few months of working with her seemed to cure most of that.
Not all of it.
They were still men of their time, after all.
But Kitty had a rather effective method of dealing with anyone who underestimated her that I had taught her.
She'd simply ask them a technical question.
Then another.
Then another.
Eventually, they'd realise that she actually knew what she was talking about. Once they stopped treating her like some rich woman's pet project and started treating her like the engineer she was quickly becoming, things became considerably more productive.
I mean, I was always attracted to intelligence, and I'm sure if she had been born in the future, she would at least have a doctorate by now.
I wasn't around most of the time… After all, my business empire was rapidly growing…but the result was…
Well.
Ridiculous.
Our goal was a car for the 1925 Le Mans, and I had decided that if we were going to do this, we were going to do it properly.
The starting point was the engine.
We settled on a three-litre straight-six producing roughly 150 horsepower. Specifically, it was a 2,996 cc engine with a 75-millimetre bore and an 87-millimetre stroke.
The block was cast iron, with aluminium cylinder heads, dual carburettors, magneto ignition and dry-sump lubrication.
The numbers themselves weren't necessarily what made the engine special.
The philosophy behind it was.
Rather than simply copying the engines already being built and making ours incrementally better, we spent an absurd amount of time trying to understand the combustion process itself.
Compression ratio, valve size, valve timing, intake-port dimensions, and combustion-chamber shape…everything became something we could experiment with.
Eventually, we settled on a compression ratio in the region of 6.5:1 to 7.1:1, depending on the final configuration and fuel we were using.
And, perhaps most importantly, we developed the engine on a dynamometer.
That mattered.
A great deal.
A dynamometer essentially allowed us to run the engine in a controlled environment while measuring what it was actually doing.
Instead of taking a guess at how much power the engine produced and then taking it onto the track to find out whether we'd been right, we could run it repeatedly in the workshop.
We could measure power.
Torque.
Temperature.
Fuel consumption.
Oil pressure.
We could deliberately change one variable, run the engine again, and see what happened.
For an endurance race, that was invaluable.
That was also why we went with a dry-sump lubrication system.
A conventional engine generally has an oil pan (or sump) bolted underneath it. Oil drains down into that pan, and a pump draws it back into the engine.
Simple.
The problem is that cars don't remain level.
During hard cornering, braking and acceleration, the oil inside that sump moves around.
If it moves far enough away from the oil pickup, the pump can suck in air instead.
And an engine does not particularly appreciate being lubricated with air.
A dry sump solved that problem.
Instead of storing all the oil underneath the engine, we used a separate oil tank. Oil was pumped into the engine, circulated through it, collected again by scavenging pumps, and then returned to the tank.
It gave us several advantages.
We could mount the engine lower because we didn't need a large oil reservoir hanging underneath it. That lowered the centre of gravity.
It maintained oil pressure far more reliably during hard cornering.
It also gave us much greater control over oil temperature and allowed us to carry more oil without making the engine itself unnecessarily tall.
The oil tank was baffled as well.
Baffles were simply internal walls designed to stop the oil from sloshing violently from one side of the tank to the other.
Think of them as a series of partitions that let oil flow where it needed to go while preventing the entire mass of oil from becoming a giant wave every time the car accelerated or cornered.
We applied the same basic philosophy to the fuel system.
The fuel tank wasn't just an empty metal box with petrol sloshing around inside it.
It was divided with baffles, with carefully controlled openings between sections so that fuel could move through the tank without violently shifting from one side to another.
That mattered because a racing car spending hours cornering, accelerating and braking could otherwise end up with its fuel moving somewhere it wasn't particularly useful.
The fuel system itself was another nightmare.
We spent an absurd amount of time experimenting with synthetic rubber.
Wherever we could reasonably replace rigid pipes with flexible ones, we did.
Not because rubber was inherently better at everything, but because rigid pipes could transmit vibration and stress through the system. Flexible sections could absorb movement, reducing the chance of fatigue failures and leaks.
That became something of a recurring theme with the entire car.
Reliability. Everything came back to reliability.
The cooling system was probably the most ridiculous example.
We massively over-engineered it.
A huge radiator. Carefully sized coolant passages. High-capacity water pumps. Thermostatic controls. Expansion space. Temperature gauges.
We weren't interested in having an engine that was usually cool enough.
We wanted one that remained cool enough after hours of continuous abuse.
The brakes received the same treatment.
Twenty-four hours of racing meant twenty-four hours of accelerating back up to speed and then converting all that kinetic energy into heat every time the driver approached a corner.
So we designed the cooling system around them as well.
Airflow was directed towards the brakes wherever possible, and we spent an unreasonable amount of time experimenting with how much cooling they actually needed. Then came the chassis.
That was where I had to admit that I was completely out of my depth.
I could point at things and say, "That needs to be stronger," or, "Can we move this lower?"
But actually calculating how the entire structure would behave under load?
No.
Absolutely not.
So we brought in a bridge engineer from Sheffield.
Because apparently when you want to build a racing car, the solution is to find someone who normally worries about whether bridges collapse.
The chassis was built around riveted and brazed steel tubes, carefully triangulated to create a rigid structure without simply adding enormous amounts of weight.
We also designed separate load paths for the major components.
The engine, suspension, steering, gearbox, fuel tank…
The idea was simple enough: forces shouldn't just be allowed to wander through the chassis wherever they pleased.
We wanted to know where the loads were going.
That meant an absolutely horrifying amount of mathematics.
I watched them cover sheets of paper with equations and diagrams.
I liked to think I was good at mathematics… Well, the bits that applied to chemistry anyway, and most of this was gibberish.
I just nodded occasionally and tried to look intelligent.