Ferrari has applied for a patent for a new engine design that utilizes oval (pill-shaped, more like) pistons rather than the conventional, circular pistons widely utilized in internal combustion engines today. These ovoid pistons make the engine more longitudinally compact, which opens up all sorts of possibilities for gasoline engine design—or so Ferrari’s engineers claim, anyway.
Credit for spotting this one goes to AutoGuide, who found the application in the European Patent Office’s database. The application notes that the typical cylindrical piston shape has “some drawbacks” that are impossible to work around within the constraints of conventional design, necessitating something a bit more radical—in this case, pistons shaped like PSPs.
Essentially, what Ferrari has done is take a standard engine and crushed it long-ways, like a beer can. See what happens if we shrink the pic of this 5.0-liter V8 block lengthwise? We get tall, skinny pistons. Ferrari’s version is a bit more sophisticated, as it utilizes properly radiused pistons rather than a true “oval” shape, but the basic idea is the same.
It’s not too hard to imagine why Ferrari would want to make its combustion engines more compact. Not only would it make them easier to fit into tight spaces (Ferrari does love its mid-engine supercars, after all), but such a change would allow engineers to place their mass closer to the car’s center of rotation, which makes the car more eager to turn. A smaller engine also creates more room for integrating hybrid components between it and the car’s transmission.
As AutoGuide also pointed out, an oval piston design may seem novel, but it’s not actually new. Honda tried something similar in its motorcycles back in the late 1970s, but the similarities between these efforts end at the shape of their pistons. Honda was trying to compete in the world of two-stroke performance bikes, and its dual-connecting-rod idea looked nothing at all like the linked, articulating rods we see on Ferrari’s design. Will those even work? V12s are notoriously well-balanced, but are they that well-balanced? We’ll just have to wait and see, assuming this ever comes to fruition. Plenty of automotive patents do not.
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