Attention racers,
Event 28 is over, and here are the abridged results, with full results and more on the event sheet.
PHLS#29 officially starts now, and five proved to be the most popular number this week, thus we’re going to explore 5-cylinder engines.
Full details, past results, and voting for events 30 and 31 up in the top post.
The Inline-5
Engines with an odd number of cylinders are rare. In configurations other than inline, the explanation is simply that you need an even number to balance the engine (though some exceptions have existed, mainly for motorcycles).
For inline engines, you can have any number of cylinders, as long as you have the space for them. Some microcars have used single-cylinder motorcycle engines, simply because it’s cheap. Inline-3 engines aren’t uncommon on modern compact and economy cars, usually paired with a turbo, to beat emission testing and nominally post better fuel economy numbers (that is, unless you use the turbo of course). Two cars in Forza use an inline-3, the GR Yaris and BMW i8. In both cases, the choice of an I3 proved optimal to maximise power output while keeping weight and displacement down.
Inline-5 engines were first anecdotally used on trucks and diesel-powered cars, but it is more readily associated with Audi, for good reason. Audi in the 70s was an obscure brand with little appeal. The inline-5 was a solution to give the Audi 100 a better engine than the aging I4, and more importantly to make people talk. After adding a turbo to it, Audi engineers figured it would make a great power plant for their future rally car.
Inside the Quattro, the inline-5 became the engine that brought Audi into the light, and later powered the RS2, TT RS and is still used in the RS3.
The other notable maker of I5 engines is Volvo, with the I5 version of the Volvo Modular engine finding its way in pretty much the whole catalogue from the 90s to the 2010s, but also used by Ford of Europe in some of their performance cars before the development of the EcoBoost, like the Fiesta ST and Focus RS, or even a high performance version of the S-Max.