A big thank you to my friend Todd Coyne for the tip on this. Certainly Smokey Yunick is no stranger to these pages. I believe John Delorean has also been mentioned a coupla’ two-tree times as well. It’s no secret these two were friends, collaborated a few times, and likely were engaged in shenanigans that the statute of limitations has not yet run out on.
Most of you have heard of Smokey’s hot vapor engine. His theory was an extremely hot intake charge would assure close to a 100% efficient burn, resulting in more power and better fuel mileage. Experts said this would cause massive detonation, but Smokey made many working prototypes. All with carburetors and no computers. Try Googling it sometimes, fascinating reading.
Did you know that Smokey and Delorean were apparently collaborating on using this technology in Deloreans cars? I didn’t until I was tipped to this auction. The seller acquired the documents from the Delorean liquidation. I’m not sure what one could do with them, but they seem a bargain for a Delorean or Smokey fan.
While recovering from a food coma last evening (beer can duck) I did a little reading about Smokeys engine. He held the patent, but his family let it go into public domain when it expired. They said Smokey gave up just enough information to get the patent, but left out key information without which it wouldn’t work. That information died with Smokey, which seems like something he would do. He wasn’t going to do all the heavy lifting and then let someone else reverse engineer his baby.
Would Smokeys engine work today? Some say with modern fuel injection and engine management systems it’s unnecessary. Some of us feel Smokey would make them even better.
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I suspect the truth about the “hot air” engine is one of three things:
1. It’s a hoax, some sort of prank that Smokey decided to play on a gullible public.
2. It’s a homogeneous charge compression ignition engine. Something that supposedly can give diesel-like efficiency on gasoline, but is nearly impossible to tune for real world use. Sort of the mileage equivalent of a dyno queen; you can get one to post impressive brake specific fuel consumption numbers in a lab, but nearly unworkable in a street car.
3. It’s not an Otto cycle engine, but something closer to an Ericcson cycle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ericsson_cycle
Except with the turbo, instead of the top of the piston, doing the compression. The piston part of the engine would be behaving more like a two-stroke.