The story of the Cosworth Casting Process is essentially a story of mind over matter. The "mind" is that of Keith Duckworth who, with partner Mike Costin, founded Cosworth Engineering in 1958. Since then, Cosworth has become a major engineering partner of Ford Motor Company, and the most successful, respected producer of racing and high-performance engines in the world.

Duckworth has said that he would rather do a few things extraordinarily well than make an average mess of doing a lot of things, and that it takes enormous effort to get the last detail right.

Today, Ford's Windsor Aluminum Plant produces some of the finest castings in the world because of Duckworth's penchant for perfection. When Ford set out to develop a powerplant for its new world car -- Mondeo in Europe, Contour and Mystique in North America -- technology for the vehicles' engine castings was the same as used to produce 14,000 rpm, 800 horsepower engines found beneath the carbon fiber bodywork of Ford's most advanced race cars. Why? Because Cosworth had developed the best process in the world for producing aluminum castings of consistent high quality.

In fact, impetus for developing the Cosworth Casting Process was in place long before Cosworth became a company. It came from Keith Duckworth's mind, and the way he approaches problem-solving.

Today, Duckworth is regarded as a genius, but he scraped through college, achieving grades that would not indicate brilliance. Such, often enough, are the deficiencies of educational systems.

Duckworth, himself, explains it this way: "In those days, people who got honors were the ones who talked to walls.... I was always in trouble passing exams because I didn't like learning anything as a parrot. While I have a good memory, I wouldn't spend the effort to program it. I really only learned the things I could understand. In exams, where I hadn't learned the equations, I just had to sit down and work everything out from first principles, so I never did sufficient in the time available, I didn't answer enough questions."1

Small wonder, then, that a couple of decades later, when the Ford-Cosworth DFV Formula One engine was approaching the zenith of its success, Duckworth again went back to "first principles" to solve a problem. At that time, state of the art in the castings industry simply was not good enough to produce consistent quality of materials necessary for Cosworth's racing engines. Specifically, it was a problem of controlling porosity.

Duckworth's frustration peaked when early DFX (turbocharged DFV variant for Indy car racing) cylinder heads were being produced: "If there was any porosity around the valve seats, we used to get heads back looking as if they had been flame-cut. We were getting a bad name for having heads which could hardly survive. I was fed up with that. My view was that if it was possible to supply good castings some of the time, it must also be possible to supply good castings all the time."2

Duckworth, therefore, implemented the search for better methods. With Dr. David Campbell heading the research, the "Coscast" process became a reality by the mid-1980s.

It was not long after Cosworth's cast components proved their durability on the world's racetracks that the special casting technique made the transition into mass production powerplants. While its foundry in Worcester, England,meets the volume supply contracts with European automakers, Cosworth Engineering has licensed its process to Ford Motor Company for use in the world's largest dedicated cylinder head and block foundry.

The Cosworth Casting Process is used in Ford's Windsor, Ontario, Canada, engine plant to create cast-in-liner blocks and four-valve heads for the Duratec V6 (2.5 and 3.0-liter) and blocks for the 4.6-liter Romeo V8 engine. Three Cosworth roll-over casting stations A HREF="2-3techsd.html"(see sidebar)/A allow the 300,000-square-foot Windsor plant to produce 1.1 million castings per year, using some 38,000 tons of aluminum. More than 100 robots contribute to the consistent quality of engine blocks and heads that help cars such as Contour and Mystique, Taurus and Sable travel 100,000 miles before their first scheduled tune-up.

That kind of precision and durability springs directly from the world of racing, where tolerances of 1/1,000th of an inch can separate a winning and losing effort ... from the minds of people who insist on getting every little detail right.

SUP1 /SUPGraham Robson. Cosworth, The Search For Power, 3rd ed. (Nr Yeovil, England: Patrick Stephens Limited, 1995) p. 32, 33/p P SUP2/SUP Ibid., p. 214