The Ford Cosworth GBA is a turbocharged V6 racing engine, designed and developed by Cosworth, in partnership with Ford, for use in Formula One, from to . The customer engine was raced by both Lola and Benetton. In the registration lists it appeared under the designations Ford TEC or Ford TEC-Turbo. The GBA was the only turbocharged Formula 1 engine that Cosworth and Ford had in the so-called turbo era, and at the same time the last new development to be used before turbo engines were banned in 1989. The Cosworth GBA competed in 1986 and 1987. Only available to selected Formula 1 teams, it did not score a win in a Formula 1 World Championship round.
Nomenclature Internally, the turbo engine bears the designation Cosworth GBA. The letter combination "GB" was intended to tie in with the Cosworth GA, Cosworth's first V6 engine from 1973, and to express that the new engine was the second Cosworth unit with this configuration. Apart from that, there was no relationship between the GA and the GB. The 3.4-liter GA was based on the Ford Essex block and was intended for use in touring car racing (Group 2).
To the public, the Cosworth GBA was marketed as the Ford TEC, TEC-Turbo, or TEC-F1; he also appeared in the entry lists for Formula 1 races. The letter combination TEC stood for Turbo Engine Cosworth.
Development history and background DFV–DFR V8s The engine manufacturer Cosworth, founded in 1958 by Keith Duckworth and Mike Costin, in partnership with Ford represented in the Formula One World Championship from with the 3.0 litre naturally aspirated DFV engine. The DFV, was freely accessible to all teams and dominated Formula One in the 1970s. With 155 world championship races won, 12 drivers' and 10 constructors' titles between the DFV's winning debut with Jim Clark and Lotus at the 1967 Dutch Grand Prix and the DFY's final win through Michele Alboreto and Tyrrell at Detroit in , it is the most successful engine in the history of Formula One. Ford remains, to this day, the 3rd most successful engine manufacturer in F1 history behind Mercedes and Ferrari despite leaving the sport in . No other manufacturer was able to design a similarly competitive naturally aspirated engine. Only with the advent of turbo engines from did the DFV gradually fall behind. From , the turbo engines were so powerful and reliable that they were able to win regularly and, a little later, also compete in the world championship. Therefore, in the early 1980s, the top and then also the midfield teams switched to turbo engines. From 1983 to 1988, all World Drivers' and Constructors' Championships went to drivers and teams with turbo engines while from 1984 to 1988 all F1GP's were won with turbo power with no naturally aspirated car even (legally) finishing on the podium in the 5 years between the 1983 Dutch Grand Prix when John Watson finished 3rd in his McLaren-Cosworth, and the 1988 Detroit Grand Prix when Thierry Boutsen finished 3rd in his Benetton powered by the then latest upgrade on the DFV, the DFR.
Cosworth reacted to the emerging turbo wave with a wait-and-see attitude. Keith Duckworth, like many at Ford itself including then Ford of Europe Vice President: Walter Hayes, considered the turbocharged engines in Formula One to be inconsistent with the regulations with Hayes saying that he thought turbos were a distortion of the rules and that he didn't believe 1.5 litres turbocharged was the equivalent of 3.0 litres un-turbocharged, and as such both Ford and Cosworth did not deal with supercharged Formula One engines at all until 1982. A supercharged version of the DFV was created at Cosworth; however, this engine, called DFX, with a displacement of 2.65 liters was only intended for US racing series (CART). In Formula One, on the other hand, the company stayed with the naturally aspirated engine concept for a long time. The DFV was further developed into the DFY by early , and won its final three Formula One races in that year (4 if Keke Rosberg's win in the non-championship Race of Champions at Brands Hatch is counted). By the start of , only Minardi and Tyrrell had DFY engines, which now produced only around , at least less than the more powerful of the turbocharged engines just in race trim (and around less in qualifying). And by two thirds of the way through the season the DFY was gone altogether with Minardi switching to the Italian made Motori Moderni V6 turbo by Round 3 of the season and Tyrrell from Round 7 using the French Renault turbos in at least one of its two cars. By the 1985 Dutch Grand Prix, 18 years after the DFV's debut, the engine was all but gone from Formula One.
The DFV's last Formula One Grand Prix really only came about due to a team not having their actual F1 car ready. The new for team BMS Scuderia Italia team had opted to have Dallara build their chassis which would for that season would use the Cosworth built, 3.5L Ford DFZ V8. However, by the time of the opening race of the season in Brazil, the new Dallara F188 chassis was not yet ready. So, to avoid a fine for not attending all of the races, the team instead entered with the Dallara 3087 Formula 3000 chassis for their Italian driver Alex Caffi. Although the car passed F1 scrutineering in Brazil, the car could only be fitted with the 3.0L DFV, giving Caffi a severe power disadvantage. Two and a half seasons after the DFV was last seen in a Grand Prix when Martin Brundle failed to qualify his Tyrrell for the 1985 Austrian Grand Prix, Caffi failed to pre-qualify.
To highlight the speed difference between the DFY and the turbos, during qualifying for the 1985 French Grand Prix at the Circuit Paul Ricard, on the tracks long Mistral Straight, Swiss driver Marc Surer clocked what was at the time the highest speed recorded by a Formula One car when he pushed his turbocharged, Brabham-BMW (which in qualifying trim was alleged to be producing approximately that year) to . This compared to the slowest car in the race, the lone naturally aspirated Tyrrell Ford-Cosworth DFY of Stefan Bellof which could only manage .
Turbos Ford had been pushing for the development of a turbo engine for Formula One since 1981. Because of Duckworth's hesitant attitude, Ford temporarily considered cooperation with the German company in this area Racing team Zakspeed, who had experience with turbocharged engines for more than ten years of racing Ford's cars including Escorts, Capris and Mustangs. Indeed, when Zakspeed entered Formula One as a manufacturer in 1985, their self built 4 cylinder turbo engine, the Zakspeed 1500/4, was allegedly based on a Ford engine block.
When Duckworth put the idea that they should "start again" and build and develop a new turbo engine in the summer of 1984 to Ford's head of Motorsport Mike Kranefuss while the pair were touring the pits together during practice for the British Grand Prix at Brands Hatch, Ford decided to continue working with Cosworth. Development work on the Cosworth Turbo began in the fall of 1984 when all of the top teams had turbocharged engines and no team had actually been chosen for the new engine. McLaren had their Porsche built TAG turbo V6, Williams had Japanese V6 Honda power, Brabham had the powerful 4 cyl BMW engine, Renault, the pioneers of turbo power in F1 back in 1977 powered not only their own factory team with their in-house V6 turbo, but also Team Lotus and the French Ligiers, while Ferrari and Alfa Romeo who had their own in-house built V6 and V8 turbos respectively.
The development process was not linear and Cosworth faced a somewhat compressed schedule with Mike Kranefuss and Walter Hayes giving until November 1985 as the deadline for the delivery of a race ready engine. In the first phase, Cosworth designed an inline four-cylinder engine derived from the BDA series and based on an engine block from the Ford Escort and the first test engine was on Cosworth's in-house dynamometer by September 1984. Duckworth originally chose the 4 cylinder as he believed they were more compact and economical than a V6, though Cosworth's Chief Race Engine Designer Geoff Goddard was never happy with the idea, but out of respect for Duckworth's track record and position within the company, let him run with it. Over the course of 3 weeks, unsolvable problems with the load capacity of the crankshaft arose in which 6 different engines all experienced the same crankshaft issues when the engine was turbocharged (the original test engine block actually changed shape when it failed). In its original naturally aspirated form, the engine had been limited to a maximum of 10,500 rpm. Turbocharged, the engine had its first major failure soon after reaching 11,000 rpm for the first time, and only at 2.0 bar boost pressure which was well under the expected race and qualifying pressures (by , qualifying boost pressures in Formula One were said to be as high as 5.6 Bar with anywhere between 4.0 and 5.0 Bar used for racing). After the gloom of the 4 cylinder turbo project's continued failure, towards the end of 1984 Ford agreed to a full development budget and the decision was then made for a second concept, which meant a completely new design. Cosworth opted for a 120 degree V6 engine because as Duckworth explained, those who were being successful at the time were using V6 engines and Cosworth felt any future rule changes would be to suit the V6 turbos. Internally the engine received the designation GBA.
The design and development of the GBA was led by Geoff Goddard with Duckworth helping to design the engine (Duckworth would be publicly credited with the engine's design). The first drawings were made in December 1984, and the first prototype was run on the test bench by Cosworth's Chief Test Engineer Allan Morris on August 1, 1985. Although the GBA engine was designed and built with a traditional twin-turbo set up so as to be easily fitted into the usual parameters of a Formula One car, Duckworth, who believed that turbo energy was just wasted energy, ultimately planned to actually revive a pre-war 1930s concept called Compounding where the twin-turbos would be removed and instead there would be a single turbo located on top of the engine.
Despite the highly compressed schedule given by Ford, and with the loss of around 2 months on the 4 cylinder project, Cosworth had managed to design and manufacture a brand new 1.5 litre, turbocharged V6 Formula One engine in just 9 months. In February 1986 the first test drives took place at a bitterly cold (–6 °Celsius) and icy Boreham Proving Ground with Haas Lola drivers, World Champion Alan Jones, and former factory Ferrari and Renault driver Patrick Tambay, giving the engine its first run in a race car. Both drivers reported the engine was smooth, but well down on power as it was only running 2.5 Bar boost pressure, about half of the expected qualifying boost pressure. Although the biggest problem was simply that the engine was not designed to be run under Arctic conditions with Jones reporting that after around 10 laps of the circuit, its operating temperature had only just risen above the desired 80° Celsius even with the radiators purposefully blocked off. Two months later the engine made its debut in a Formula One race at the 1986 San Marino Grand Prix with Jones at the wheel while Tambay drove the old car powered by a 4-cylinder Hart 415T turbo. Jones qualified in 21st place but failed to finish the race due to overheating, the result of a holed radiator.