Keith Duckworth

20/12/2005

Keith Duckworth, co founder of Cosworth Engineering, died on Sunday, 18th December, 2005 at the age of 72.

Keith was once shown around the engine department of one of the Detroit Big Three. As the world's most successful designer of racing engines, everyone hung on his every word. Someone asked him what he thought of their engines and Keith said they were crap. Consternation all round. Keith said, "Imagine you are the gas inside a cylinder. You've got a bloody great piston coming up your chuff and you want the quickest way out. Have you provided the quickest way out?"

That was typical Duckworth. He was blunt and didn't waste words. He also had the ability to take something as complicated as thermodynamics and reduce it to a simple image which a child could understand. It was that clarity of thought which made him such a formidable designer. Provided you did not pretend to know more than you actually did, he would take infinite pains to explain things.

Keith was born in Blackburn, Lancashire, in 1933 and was educated at Giggleswick Grammar School, a boarding school in Yorkshire. After National Service in the RAF, he went to Imperial College, London.

He did not cover himself with glory and managed only a 'Pass' degree, the lowest level, but then, so he told me, he was more interested in working things out for himself rather than learning what other people had established. One of his lecturers recognised his ability and recommended that he go on to do a PhD, which is almost unheard of for someone getting a mere pass. Keith said, "That was a rare moment of clarity for an academic."

Keith bought a Lotus Mk VI kit which he fitted with a Coventry Climax FWA engine. After two or three races he realised a) he would never be World Champion and b) racing was too expensive for him. He had become one of the volunteers who helped out at Lotus and, in 1957, joined the company full time, where he specialised in transmissions, in particular, he tried to sort out the first Lotus 'Queerbox'.

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