Peugeot Prevails

That was the preview from EuroSport for this year's race, but the results are in:

Audi is eclipsed at the 77th running of the Le Mans 24 hours. Peugeot's push to the first podium step took three years this go around, Peugeot's last overall win coming in 1993.

There's an old salt about racing that says while the American's enjoy the spectacular the Europeans revel in the epic. There is nothing else that compares with the French road race at Le Mans as an epic battle of man & machine against time and each other. But in the end at Le Mans you have to defeat time and entropy before you can beat your human opponents.

Nowhere else is the saying, "to finish first, you first have to finish", as apropos. Le Mans is grueling, unforgiving of the unprepared, and can test the will of the strongest. It is, quite possibly, the premier race in motorsports.

Run by the Automobile Club of the West (ACO), the race features four classifications of cars (two prototype and two sports car classes). It has been won overall by diesel prototypes for four years running.

Rules for next years race will open the door for hybrid systems, keeping the ACO in the forefront of technical innovation. Le Mans will continue to be important and relevant.

Horsepower

Picked up a copy of "Horsepower!: A Century of Great American Engines", by Mike Mueller. At 176, 8 1/2" by 11", pages, it isn't nearly as inclusive as one would like, but it does hit the highlights.

A quick read of the chapter devoted to the Offenhauser engine shows that it is well researched. I picked up a couple of tidbits on the big Offy that I was unaware of (and I've got a pretty good collection of Miller/Offenhauser material to base that on).

The big Offy was a descendant of a Miller marine engine. In various displacements (by twiddling bore and stroke), the big Offy OWNED the Indy 500 from the mid-1930s through the mid-1970s.

It actually traces its true origins one step further back to the 1912 Peugeot grand prix engine, a double overhead cam (DOHC) four cylinder. The Charlatans beat everyone to the punch with a fabulous DOHC hemi headed four of quite small displacement for the times. Bear in mind the FIAT 14 litre monstrosities were still running strong when the Peugeot arrived on the scene and changed everything.

But enough of that digression rearward, back to the Offy. The Offy was unusual in that its cylinder head was cast integrally with the cylinders. And that little piece of design genius allowed massive supercharging (in the Miller Indy cars of the 1920s) and high boost turbocharging in the Offy engines that ran the USAC circuit.

The book manages to capture those points and more, and while there is less pure technical information than I'd like, it still has a wealth of details on some pretty important engines in American automotive history.

I've embedded a snap of an Offy 270 sitting in a sprint car that was lovingly recreated by a gentleman in Kansas City.