'They screamed, howled or thundered': intoxicating sound of F1’s greatest age

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Three days from now, on Friday May 22, 2026, it will be exactly 60 years since Jackie Stewart won one of the strangest, most transitional, and most revealing grands prix in Formula 1 history: the 1966 Monaco Grand Prix.

It was strange because it inaugurated what would become F1’s greatest engine formula while simultaneously failing, almost comically, to showcase the engines that the new formula had been created to showcase. It was transitional because the sport was stepping out of one philosophy into another, shrugging off the modesty of 1.5-litre propulsion and rediscovering hefty grunt and thunderous noise. And it was revealing because, viewed from today’s perspective six decades later, Monaco 1966 tells us something profound about F1 itself: namely that it used to be utterly compelling despite its not being perfectly regulated or clinically optimised, because that very absence of regulatory optimisation allowed ingenuity, improvisation, and audacity to run riot in glorious untidiness.

Modern motor sport fans, conditioned by F1’s sophisticated marketing, meticulous brand management, strict power unit freezes, exacting budget caps, and management structures of terrifying corporate complexity, may scarcely believe what happened in the spring of 1966. The FIA had decreed that F1 would abandon its puny 1.5-litre naturally aspirated engine formula and move to a much more muscular 3.0-litre naturally aspirated engine formula. The intention was obvious enough. The 1.5-litre era, introduced in 1961, had produced some exquisite racing cars and some sublime engineering, but, despite that, older pundits and fans who still rued the loss of the mighty engines that had powered the grand prix behemoths of the 1930s and 1950s felt that F1’s visceral and aural spectacle, and consequently its elemental savagery, had diminished. Moreover, sports cars were now significantly faster than F1 cars, and that would never do.

The trouble was that, while legislators can alter rules with the flourish of a pen, engineers require rather more than new paperwork to produce new engines. Or, to put it another way, designing, testing, manufacturing, and developing competitive and reliable 3.0-litre F1 engines was not a task that could be completed between Christmas and Easter. So, when the teams arrived in Monte-Carlo in May for the first world championship-status F1 grand prix under the new-for-1966 engine formula, the majority of them were not yet ready for it.

What unfolded therefore now appears almost surreal. F1 had become a 3.0-litre formula in theory, yet in practice the Monaco field was populated by a wonderfully eccentric assortment of stopgap machines. BRM arrived with the two Tasman Series cars, powered by 2.0-litre V8s, that Jackie Stewart and Graham Hill had raced with great success in January, February, and March in New Zealand, Australia, and Tasmania. Ferrari turned up with a 3.0-litre V12 in John Surtees’ car and a 2.4-litre V6 in Lorenzo Bandini’s. Jack Brabham fielded a 3.0-litre Repco V8 in his own car and a 2.8-litre Climax straight-four in Denny Hulme’s.

Lotus had a 2.0-litre Climax V8 in Jim Clark’s car and a 3.0-litre BRM H16 that was heavy, bulky, overcomplicated, underdeveloped, and therefore completely unusable in Peter Arundell’s and Mike Spence’s; in the end Spence abandoned it and swapped it for a 2.0-litre BRM V8, whereas, lacking any viable engine, poor Arundell was withdrawn from the race. Anglo American Racers’ 3.0-litre Weslake V12 was not yet available, so Dan Gurney was a frustrated spectator all weekend; indeed, in the races after Monaco, he would have to make do with a 2.8-litre Climax straight-four until Monza 15 weeks later, when the long-awaited 3.0-litre Weslake V12 would finally make its F1 grand prix debut. Bruce McLaren’s eponymous team was making its F1 grand prix debut at the Principality, its only car fitted with a loud and heavy downsized-to-3.0-litres ex-IndyCar Ford V8, whose development had been paid for by the makers of the movie Grand Prix in return for the car being painted in a striking white and blue livery, for filming was to be conducted on the famous streets that weekend. Impressively, Cooper had 3.0-litre Maserati V12s in all four of its cars – but, all in all, Monaco 1966 was less the beginning of a coherent engine formula than a wonderfully eccentric mishmash.

Unsurprisingly perhaps, the race was one of compelling attrition. The doughty Stewart won for BRM a marathon that ran to more than two-and-a-half hours, and Bandini was a distant second for Ferrari. Third, a lap behind, was Hill in the other works BRM, and fourth, albeit lapped five times, was American sports car ace Bob Bondurant in a privateer BRM. No other cars were classified, which means that 75 per cent of the finishers were BRMs, which is the kind of stat to which I like to append the hashtag #AnorakFact. Reliability had been extremely fragile, not only for engines but also for gearboxes, and as a result only four of the 16 cars proved equal to the task of completing anything like the scheduled 100 laps, which also counts as an #AnorakFact by my reckoning.

Yet from chaos emerged magnificence. For, once the engineers had caught up with the regulations, F1 entered the finest era in the history of the world championship: that of the naturally aspirated 3.0-litre engine formula that lasted 20 seasons from the beginning of 1966 until the end of 1985. No other F1 engine formula has endured remotely as long, and there was good reason for its longevity. The regulations achieved a near-perfect equilibrium between conceptual clarity and technical freedom. Engines could be V8s, V12s, or flat-12s, or occasionally even stranger configurations. They could be narrow or wide, or torquey or peaky; they could scream, howl, bark, shriek, or thunder according to their cylinder count and design architecture; above all, they all sounded utterly magnificent.

Noise matters more than modern technocrats sometimes admit, for F1 is not merely a competition; it is theatre. Race engines should assault the senses. They should reverberate through grandstands, tunnel into rib cages, and leave conversation temporarily impossible. The naturally aspirated 3.0-litre engines achieved that with intoxicating consistency. Today’s turbo-hybrid V6 power units do not.

Moreover, in 1967 the naturally aspirated 3.0-litre engine formula delivered an engine that transformed F1: the 3.0-litre Cosworth DFV, the double-four-valve V8 conceived by Keith Duckworth, funded by Ford, and introduced by Lotus at Zandvoort. Every superlative attached to the DFV is justified, for it is the greatest F1 engine of all time. It is the daddy of all F1 engines not only because it won so much, although it did indeed do that; and not only because it lasted so long, although it did that, too; but also because it democratised competitiveness in F1. Before the DFV, the 1.5-litre F1 engine programmes had been the province of five car manufacturers and one engine specialist – Ferrari, Maserati, Alfa Romeo, Honda, Porsche, and Climax – but after the arrival of the DFV independent F1 teams could purchase world-beating power, off the shelf, for just £7500 a pop.

Lotus boss Colin Chapman was first in the queue to do just that – and his Lotus 49, designed around Cosworth’s powerful, compact, and light new V8, was unbeatably competitive straight away, winning the 1967 Dutch Grand Prix in Clark’s hands on its F1 debut and winning the 1968 F1 drivers’ and constructors’ world championships in Hill’s hands after Clark’s tragic death that year. As a result of the Cosworth’s immediate hegemony, suddenly F1’s ecosystem changed. By 1969 not only Lotus but also McLaren, Matra, and Brabham were running Cosworth-engined cars, as well as a gaggle of new privateers including a young upstart named Frank Williams; and by 1972, five years after the DFV had first appeared, they had been joined by more new Cosworth-contracted constructors: Tyrrell, March, Surtees, Eifelland, Tecno, and Connew, and more new names would be added throughout the 1970s. The DFV did not merely power cars; it empowered teams.

Its record is staggering. From Clark’s victory on its debut at Zandvoort in 1967 right through to the early 1980s, it became F1’s heartbeat. Drivers loved it; engineers trusted it; mechanics understood it; spectators worshipped it; and its crisp, raucous, and hard-edged V8 note became the defining soundtrack for an entire F1 generation.

Yet we should resist the temptation to romanticise the era solely through a DFV prism, for the naturally aspirated 3.0-litre engine formula also produced astonishing variety. F1 in those years was not monophonic but orchestral. There was the 3.0-litre Matra V12, perhaps the most beautiful-sounding F1 engine ever created, its note more operatic than mechanical, as though each gearchange presaged a new Puccini aria.

There was the 3.0-litre Weslake V12, fragile yet fascinating, powering Gurney’s exquisite Eagle T1G, which Ron Dennis once told me he regarded as the most beautiful F1 car of all time. I think Ron was right, by the way: if F1 cars were to be judged solely by aesthetics, that car, drawn by Len Terry, would reside permanently in the Louvre. Its engine, alas, was more ambitious than it was durable, but even its exhausts were works of art.

There was BRM’s extraordinary 3.0-litre V12 and H16, a powerplant whose sound at full cry provides one of racing’s most spine-tingling experiences. BRM, magnificently and sometimes ruinously patriotic, persisted with engineering complexity long after simpler solutions might have prevailed. Believe it or not, a V24 had been considered before the H16 configuration was finally selected.

And there was Alfa Romeo’s sports car flat-12, which was heavy and slow in the Brabham BT45 of 1976, was lighter and faster in the Brabham BT45B of 1977, and is most famous for powering the Brabham BT46B fan car to victory for Niki Lauda at Anderstorp in 1978.

Then there was Ferrari. There is always Ferrari. The Scuderia’s 3.0-litre V12s were lovely things but in the mid and late 1970s its 3.0-litre flat-12 became the most formidable engine in F1. Mauro Forghieri’s epic creation endowed the Ferraris of Niki Lauda, Clay Regazzoni, Carlos Reutemann, Gilles Villeneuve, and Jody Scheckter with immense power, tractability, and drivability. By 1975 the Ferrari had eclipsed the Cosworth in terms of not only horsepower but also reliability. The old Cossie, heroic though it remained, was beginning to look vulnerable against Maranello’s technical sophistication.

But evolution rarely proceeds tidily, and the arrival of ground-effect aerodynamics in the late 1970s unexpectedly restored the DFV’s supremacy. Suddenly engine width mattered enormously because designers needed clean venturi tunnels along the flanks of their cars, so as to maximise underbody airflow. The Ferrari flat-12, for all its muscular magnificence, was simply too wide for that, and the narrowness of the Cosworth V8 became an aerodynamic advantage of immense significance. Lotus exploited it first and best with its 78 ‘wing car’ of 1977 and its 79 ’ground-effect car’ of 1978. Mario Andretti won 10 F1 grands prix in those beautiful machines, and he became 1978 F1 world champion in the 79. Other Cosworth-powered F1 world championship-winning cars followed, from Williams and Brabham. Despite its flat-12 engine’s prodigious power, Ferrari found itself conceptually stranded.

The naturally aspirated 3.0-litre era encompassed a concentration of driving greatness that now feels almost mythological. It started with Jackie Stewart, cerebral, immaculate, and blindingly quick; the story continued with Jim Clark, born to lead and win from the front; Dan Gurney, the rival whom Clark most respected; Graham Hill, suave and successful; Jack Brabham, considerably tougher than old boots; Chris Amon, bewilderingly luckless; Jochen Rindt, thrillingly committed, driving as though every lap represented a personal argument with mortality; Emerson Fittipaldi, calm and calculating; Ronnie Peterson, than whom no-one has ever been more gifted; Niki Lauda, analytical brilliance fused with unimaginable courage; James Hunt, a charismatic hell-raiser who was as brave and as fast as anyone; Carlos Reutemann, enigmatic, inconsistent, but freakishly quick when the mood took him; Mario Andretti, racing versatility incarnate; Gilles Villeneuve, the greatest entertainer of them all; Jody Scheckter, transformed from wild man to master craftsman; Alan Jones, uncompromisingly capable and much, much quicker than most people now give him credit for; Nelson Piquet, sly and intelligent beneath the playboy façade; Keke Rosberg, smoking his way to sideways triumphs; I could, I assure you, go on.