What's the news?
1.5 litres isn't a lot. I'll bet there's a bottle of dairy produce in your fridge with more capacity than that. Your bottle of milk doesn't produce 800hp though...
Let me explain. In the late Seventies, Formula 1 got its first taste of turbo engines through Renault, and despite early reliability issues and lag measurable with a calendar, the rest of the grid followed throughout the next decade. The famous Brabham team, ran at the time by none other than Bernie Ecclestone, contracted BMW Motorsport to power its challengers, the most successful of which was the arrow-shaped BT52 which took Nelson Piquet to the World Championship in 1983.
Based on the M10 production car block (which had roots in the early Sixties), the M12 engine produced nearly 650hp in race trim, with 800hp available in qualifying. The pace of engine development throughout the decade led to a power war the like of which was never seen before or since. Special toluene-heavy fuels, ECU wizardry courtesy of Bosch and six bars of boost meant that this same engine would hit over 1400hp in qualifying spec before the turbos were banned for 1989 and onwards. 1400hp was the figure that the engineers quoted in any case, as their dyno couldn't read over 1000hp, and the engine still had a couple of thousand RPMs to give...
Therefore, taking a priceless Brabham BT52 with one of these little rockets shoved up its backside to the Alps might be considered a little ludicrous. But that's exactly what BMW did as part of their 100th birthday celebrations, along with an M1 Procar and a host of other significant racing machines of historical significance. Sometime-F1 pilot Nelson Piquet Jr threaded his father's BT52 through the rocks and hairpins, with the four-cylinder barking away at the local sheep. Watch the view below.
Anything else?
As you can imagine, this miracle engine has more myths and legends associated with it than you can shake a stick at. One is that BMW's engineers bought back production car blocks with over 100,000km on them, the reason being that they would be much tougher than freshly cast units due to having survived years of stresses. These were then left outside to be weathered, and allegedly even urinated on by the mechanics before being turned into engine-shaped bombs... Different times!
<iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/OF-H4kynu3c" width="560" height="315"></iframe>