Aston Martin's new ‘hot vee’, dry-sump ‘TM01’ V6 engine, so named because the turbos lie in the vee of the engine, looks as exciting on paper as it probably will be in the flesh. Although Aston isn’t disclosing a huge amount of detail at this stage, the picture of it shown above reveals a lot.
Starting at the bottom, there’s that sump. ‘Dry’ sump is a bit of a contradiction in terms, because sumps on engines store oil and dry sumps are designed to do the opposite. Instead of a large, deep sump full of engine oil, the dry sump is reduced to a shallow pan and gives two advantages.
The main one is that oil is pumped around the engine from a separate tank, so there’s no chance of the oil pick-up collecting air instead of oil during hard cornering, braking and acceleration. The second is that a shallow pan in place of a deep sump means the engine can sit low in the chassis, lowering the car’s centre of gravity.
Bottom left looks like the dry sump pump. The difference between this and a standard oil pump is that it scavenges oil as well as pumping it, and it scavenges faster than it pumps, so the pan remains quite dry – hence the name. If it didn’t, the engine would drown in its own oil.
The Y-shaped casing on the front of the engine is likely to cover chains, rather than belts, taking drive from the crankshaft up to the four camshafts.
The pair of black circular covers at the top of each Y form part of the variable cam timing mechanism and give away the position of each camshaft. Above that are the air compressors of the twin BorgWarner turbos. On top of each one, a black electronic control unit opens and closes the turbo’s wastegate on the ‘hot side’ of the turbo, towards the rear of the engine, via a rod.
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