RE: Matra V12 at Monza: Time For Tea?

[lamboman100]

No doubt about it. The peak of motor racing was '75 to '95. When modern tech collided with old rules of "couldn't care less" safety.

[Kaiser_Wull]

PowerslideSWE said:

Housey said:

I get the Ferrari V12/BRM V16 thing, I get they are fantastic. But the Matra is simply the sweetest of them all to my ears and if heard in the distance, quite the most haunting. I will leave this here and apologise for the utter garbage quality, but THIS is a haunting and epic sound!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8fcA6lcpX4

Has to be silly loud that thing concidering how loud it is not even in viewing distance. My favorite sounding engine of all time, excluding the BRM.

And bear in mind that it was running with a rev limiter, so there was even more of the top end wail to come......................

[Stelvio1]

Super dooper - the thrill of the Matra wail, expectation... before it came into view at Silverstone is etched in my memory

[jtopps]

Monza was stunningly beautiful back then. That is what struck me almost as much as that fantastic noise.

[Ipelm]

The V12 engines from the period all sound great, very different from the high pitched screamers that came in more modern times. See all of the Ferrari videos on Petrolicious.com for more.

Interestingly Tony Rudd the BRM team manager and sometime designer alleged that someone from the Owen Organisation must have sold the design of the BRM V12 block and bottom end to Matra, and reckoned that it was identical to the point of being interchangeable. Given that most of the BRM blocks were extensively patched after various blow ups I am not sure. The weakness of the BRM V12 was its cylinder heads (according to John Surtees) as they tended to overheat the engines after a few laps and lose power. The truth is difficult to know as the politics at BRM were pretty toxic!

Certainly the Matra cylinder head designs were very different to the BRM's so maybe??

[zeppelin101]

I think this has to feature somewhere in the running.

Note the miserable frenchman driving said engine on the test bed...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OS_k0V8Bvw

[dinkel]

Bumped into these at the portimao Classic 2010:




V12:

[cirian75]

lamboman100 said:

No doubt about it. The peak of motor racing was '75 to '95. When modern tech collided with old rules of "couldn't care less" safety.

Yup, they could easy make the current cars 1500bhp monsters race trim/ 1750bhp qualifying but don't.

[zeppelin101]

I for one quite like the fact that there isn't a funeral after every other Formula 1 race these days though.

[dinkel]

There isn't a funeral after a Masters F1 race either:

Just plain and honest racing, the sound of 500 brake DFVs and pensioners racing the cars they had on their 70s walls.

[JBT]

Cracking clip, one of my favorites. It comes from a DVD / VHS called 'Lap of the Gods', a collection of onboard clips on GP cars from about '77 to '87, from the Alain Boisnard's AFAVA company. Most are filmed onboard an Elf sponsored car (AFAVA produced most of Elf's GP promo films until the end of 1993), but there are some non Elf car clips such as Pierluigi Martini's Minardi at Suzuka in '87. No sound at work so I can't check, but Murray Walker does commentate on each lap on the original DVD / VHS, but there are engine sound only versions out there on YT too that have Murray's voice edited out.

My absolute favourite clips from Lap of the Gods are two onboard with Patrick Depailler in his Tyrrell 008, which many of you will have seen before - a very very wet couple of laps at Montreal in '78, where full opposite lock on corner exit with the DFV screaming happens regularly; and during practice at Long Beach also in '78, which for my money give you the closest idea of what driving a GP car at full chat in the '70s was like. The man had iron cohones 'for sure'.

[Veeayt]

Didn't read the whole thread (slow connection), but isn't that the same car with weird 12-3-1 exhaust config that was rendered perfect for a V12?