The title of this piece is a nod to the passion of the
Hartleys. Nelson’s latest V12 masterpiece is a case
in point. He has always yearned to do a V12, he
has had several project starts, but never got past
the doodling stage. He wanted to do a one-off
homage to the classic V12’s that powered so
many F1 cars in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
“I’ve been wanting to do a V12 or something a
bit more exotic for quite some time, but I haven’t
really had an application for it,” says Nelson. “I’d
even started drawing up my own block and heads
– I wanted to make something that reflected the
V12 Grand Prix cars I listened to growing up – I
liked the sound of them and they are relatively
simple and reasonably easy to replicate. But like
all projects that you’re not being paid for, you
don’t finish it unless someone’s waiting. Plus, it’s a
major undertaking building an engine from scratch.
Producing the castings and billet parts is a big
job.”
When Jaron Olivecrona came along wanting
to do something a bit different for his Nissan
Silvia S14 drift car, the V12 idea resurfaced. “I
was interested straight away, and had plenty of
ideas already on file,” says Nelson. “Jaron and
his father Kester import a lot of cars and they
had a Toyota 1GZ V12 sitting around for a while,
that they picked up at an auction somewhere
in Japan. To be honest it’s a terrible motorsport
engine in standard trim, which is why not many
people have used it. What’s good about it is that
I can buy 10-20 blocks and heads tomorrow, so
if someone wanted 10 I could supply using the
Toyota castings. Whereas, if we used a Ferrari,
Aston Martin or Lamborghini V12 as the core I’d
only ever be able to do maybe one or two.”
To make their own block and heads is a significant
investment and few customers would want to
contribute to the development. “There’s a lot of
work in making a block and cylinder heads,” says
Nelson. “I can definitely do it and if a client wants
me to make them from scratch I will, but we’d
have to have a considerable order of units to
justify it – it’s doable, but there are probably better
ways of spending that kind of money.”
The base engine is a 5L Toyota 1GZ-FE V12,
Japan’s only V12, which powered the Toyota
Century Limousine exclusively for the Japanese
HARTLEY
market from 1997 to 2016. In standard trim it
produces about 308bhp at a stately 4000rpm.
“It’s not uncommon for people to use the Toyota
1GZ-FE engine as a base,” says Nelson. “But not
a lot of people in this industry have the equipment
or skills to go too much further than buying and
fitting after-market parts from a catalogue, there
isn’t a whole lot available, or at least, there isn’t a
whole lot available that are worth using for a race
car, so that left the 1GZ-FE as a pretty underdeveloped
engine. Perfect for us, as we can make
virtually anything given enough motivation.”
What appealed about the Toyota was that it’s a
readily available donor motor, and a fairly simple
motor that could be modified to suit the new
application “We used very few standard parts, just
the block and head castings, and at the moment
it has the standard crankshaft,” says Nelson. “But
I don’t think it’s going to last very long. We are
going to have to make a crank very soon – we
used the standard part just to get the prototype
going.”
" I D O N ' T E V E N R E F E R T O I T A S
A T O Y O TA A N Y M O R E , J U S T A
H A R T L E Y V 1 2 "
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