A year later and I can’t stop thinking about this thing. I’d call it an X14. There’s a VW made Chinese domestic market 2.5L VR6 that could work as a basis for a 5.8L version. Seeing it made and put in an R8 has become a life goal of mine
They had an absolute mare with their flat 8s. Their first design used the "obvious" layout: putting two of their boxer-fours end-to-end, offset by 90°. Although fine as a 1.5 litre engine in F1, once enlarged to 3 litres, it had a habit of exploding flywheels due to the torsional vibration. The vibration resulted from the kinetic energy exchange caused by the 90° offset: the pistons in one of the boxer fours at one end of the noodley crankshaft were slowing down exactly as the pistons in the opposite four were speeding up. They "fixed" that and were even rewarded with simpler exhaust plumbing with their next layout, seen in this video. They swapped the 180° "boxer" pairs for a 90° crank offset instead, each bank now a standard inline-four. This unfortunately stacked the secondary forces ordinary ("flat plane") 4 cylinder engines are notorious for and so caused the engine ancillaries to either vibrate clean off their mounts on the engine, or simply stopped working. Porsche went back to the boxer arrangement and just made everything stronger, although the torsional vibration still robbed the engine of power. I'm mostly certain the surviving engines use this last configuration. This is the same torsional vibration that made BRM's H16 underpowered and prone to breakages, and also killed Coventry Climax's and Porsche's flat 16s. The flat plane crank works wonders in a V-engine; not so much a flat-engine. A simple common-pin cross-plane crankshaft was the solution they all avoided because of concerns around imbalance and torsional vibration, likely due to prior experience with them in V-engines!
That's a great engine right there. And since you've got some soviet engines would it be possible to recreate the YAMZ/KAMAZ-741? It was an experimental V10 engine with a single turbo producing 260hp. It was basically the same as the 740 V8 but with 2 extra cylinders. The bore and stroke are both 120mm so it shouldn't be too bad. And other details shouldn't be too hard to find cause the engine shared the same components as the V8.
