Bugatti Has The Perfect Opportunity To Bring Back The Straight-Eight

Bugatti will unleash the first production V-16 engine since the pre-war era, it claims, powering a hypercar set for imminent unveiling. Besides being an impressive number of cylinders, though, a V-16 is functionally just two straight-eights joined at the crank.

Of course, it's much more complicated to execute such a simple concept, but the V-16 gives Bugatti an opportunity to reach back in time; it'll not only build the first V-16 production car in nearly a hundred years, but also the first straight-eight in decades.

The pre-war Bugatti—not the company we know today—was known for its straight-eight engines. High-revving, small-displacement, and often supercharged, they formed some of the most potent powertrains of the era. It may be difficult to picture what these engines were like if near-exact replicas weren't still built by a company called Pur Sang. Jay Leno's shot a few videos wherein he flogs Pur Sang's wares. 

Straight-eights make a unique sound, but there's a good reason why they went out of production. The short answer is V-8s work better in most cases, for reasons of packaging, weight, and cost. Companies that stuck with the straight-eight, like Packard, were seen as old-fashioned even in the 1950s. 

The long answer is that the crankshaft and camshafts get too long and flimsy to be practical in comparison to a V-8. Companies solved this problem several ways in the past. They drove the camshafts from the center of the engine, for instance, which kept the forces along the length of the shafts more consistent. They also configured the engines to have small bores and long strokes in order to keep the crankshaft's journals and counterweights as close to the crank's centerline as possible.

There were still fundamental misunderstandings about engine construction back then, though, which is easy to say in hindsight. Some straight-eights didn't have a bearing to support every throw of the crank, for instance, which every modern engine has. In a nutshell, the internal combustion engine hadn't even fully matured by the time the straight-eight was abandoned. 

The modern Bugatti-Rimac has clearly solved many of these problems, as many of them likewise plagued the W-16.