Ford-Cosworth HB engine
The HB is a series of 3.5-litre, naturally-aspirated V8 Formula One racing engines, designed, developed and produced by Cosworth, in partnership with Ford; and used between and. The customer engines were used by Benetton, Fondmetal, McLaren, Lotus, Minardi, Footwork, Simtek, and Larrousse.
Origin
Rebooting in the new naturally-aspirated engine formula
The British engine manufacturer Cosworth, founded in 1958 by Keith Duckworth and Mike Costin, was represented in the Formula 1 World Championship for 17 years from 1967 with the 3.0-liter naturally aspirated DFV engine. Funded by Ford, the DFV was freely available and dominated Formula 1 in the 1970s. With 155 world championship races won, 12 driver's and 10 constructor's titles between 1967 and 1983, it is the most successful engine in the history of Formula 1. During this time, no other manufacturer was able to design a similarly competitive naturally aspirated engine. Only with the advent of turbo engines in 1977 did the DFV gradually fall behind. In the early 1980s, Formula 1 teams gradually switched to turbo engines; in the 1986 season, only turbocharged engines were allowed. Cosworth had the turbocharged GBA V6 engine in its range, which, unlike the DFV, was only available to selected customers. When the FIA surprisingly decided in October 1986 to allow conventional naturally aspirated engines - now with 3.5 liters displacement - in addition to the turbos from the 1987 season, Cosworth was the only engine manufacturer who was able to react to this rule change at short notice. From the DFV block designed in 1966, a 3.5-liter variant was developed within three months, which was given the designation DFZ. The quickly built DFZ was an interim solution. In 1988 the further developed version DFR, which was still based on the DFV, appeared. In its first year, Benetton received the DFR engine exclusively, after which it was used in various versions until 1991 by 14 mostly smaller teams as a customer engine.Factory and customer engines
Ford and Cosworth recognized early on that the DFR could not compete permanently with the new ten and twelve-cylinder engines from Ferrari, Honda, or Renault. Therefore, at the beginning of 1988, the decision was made to develop a completely new naturally aspirated engine. After defining the concept, the first drawings of the engine known as HB were made in May 1988, in December 1988 the first blocks ran on the test bench, and at the French Grand Prix in July 1989 the HB went into racing.According to the original plans, the HB engines were only to be permanently available to the Benetton team as so-called works engines, while customer teams were to be supplied exclusively with the old DFZ and DFR engines. Although teams like Lotus and Tyrrell were already trying to get customer HBs in the spring of 1989, Ford and Cosworth stuck to this dichotomy until the end of 1990, under pressure from Benetton. However, Ford in particular was not satisfied with Benetton's results. Benetton ended the 1990 season third in the Constructors' Championship; In 1990, however, the team had repeatedly lost out to the Tyrrell Racing Organization, whose cars with old DFR engines had been faster in some qualifying sessions than the Benettons with the HB blocks. Since Benetton had also only won two races in 1990, Cosworth and Ford became more willing in the fall of 1990 to make the HB engine available to at least one other team in 1991. The choice fell on the Formula 1 debutant Jordan Grand Prix, from which Benetton did not expect any danger. After just one year, Jordan abandoned the HB engines. For 1992, Benetton again requested an exclusive supply of HB engines. For this reason, and also because the previous customer engines of the DFR type were no longer competitive, Ford initially announced in autumn 1991 that it would completely discontinue the customer engine business at the end of the season and concentrate exclusively on Benetton. In December 1991, however, there was a reversal: Because there was still a need for some small teams, Ford and Cosworth also provided customer engines from 1992. The customer engine business was now operated with the HB blocks, however, the customer HBs were at least one or more stages of development behind the Benetton factory engines. In addition, until 1993, customer engines were generally not serviced at Cosworth itself, but at Grand Prix Engines Services, a subsidiary of Tom Walkinshaw Racing. John Judd's company Engine Developments initially supplied independent customer engines. They were cheaper than Cosworth's HB engines, but were no longer available from 1993 because Judd from 1993 on the provision of Yamaha-Engines specialized for Tyrrell.
The coexistence of Benetton's factory HBs and customer HBs existed until 1993. It was only broken up in 1993 by the McLaren customer team, which emphatically demanded that equivalent engines be supplied and was able to enforce this from the middle of the season. By 1994 only small, economically weak teams that had no access to factory engines used it for lack of alternatives. While still lighter and generally more economical than the V10s and V12s it was down on power. The HB had become the "motor of the poor."
Further development
From 1991, Cosworth worked on a successor to the HB series. Initial considerations were aimed at a twelve-cylinder engine; Corresponding press releases were distributed on the occasion of the Canadian Grand Prix in 1991 and repeated until the spring of 1992. However, after Cosworth had already carried out some detailed developments, the twelve-cylinder project was abandoned in 1992. The successor to the HB was instead an eight-cylinder engine that took over some of the details of the unrealized V-12 Cosworth. Released exclusively by Benetton in 1994 and bearing the internal designation EC, it was marketed as the Ford Zetec-R. Benetton driver Michael Schumacher won with the EC his first driver's world championship this year. The HB ran parallel to this until the end of the 1994 season with the customer teams. After that, it was obsolete because the FIA reduced the displacement limit to 3.0 liters for the 1995 season after the fatal accidents of Roland Ratzenberger and Ayrton Senna at the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix. However, Cosworth designed the Cosworth ED on the basis of the HB, which was available alongside the more powerful Zetec engines from 1995 to 1997 as a pure customer engine.Background
The DFV/DFZ/DFR replacement was designed by Geoff Goddard to result in HB V8, which was introduced with the Benetton team midway through 1989 making its debut at the French Grand Prix, and won the Japanese Grand Prix that year. As Ford's de facto works team, Benetton maintained exclusivity with this model through the rest of 1989 and. saw the introduction of customer units, two specifications behind their works equivalents. In 1991, these were supplied to the fledgling Jordan Grand Prix outfit, and for 1992, Lotus. saw the customer deal extended to McLaren who had lost the use of their Honda V12 engines after 1992. Using the customer HBA7, McLaren won five Grands Prix with triple World Champion Ayrton Senna that year.The HBA1 V8 was introduced in 1989. It exploited a narrower 75° vee-angle rather than the 90° used in the DFV series, and was originally rated at approximately. By 1993, the factory HBA8 V8 engine used by Benetton was producing approximately at 13,000 rpm. Although the HB V8 was less powerful than the V10s and V12s used by rivals Renault, Honda, and Ferrari, its advantage was that it was lighter and gave better fuel economy.
A Jaguar-badged version of the HB was developed by Tom Walkinshaw Racing to the tune of 650 bhp at 11,500 rpm for sports car racing, fitted to the extremely successful Jaguar XJR-14 sports prototype.