The standard routes to achieving more power in a car are fairly well trodden – turbochargers and superchargers, porting and polishing, freer flowing exhausts and so on. More air and fuel into the engine equals more power and torque out. Alternatively, why not just add another engine like these engineers did?
The six best cars with two engines
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Alfa Romeo Bimotore
Motorsport has always been the crucible of the white heat of technology but many developments turned out to be dead ends, and this spectacular racing machine is a case in point. With Germany dominating Grand Prix racing by the middle of the 1930s, national pride had to be salvaged by Italy. Scuderia Ferrari was given the task of matching the might of the Auto Union and Mercedes streamliners. The approach taken by team principle Enzo Ferrari and his technical director Luigi Bazzi was one of brute power.
An Alfa Romeo P3 chassis was lengthened in order to accept two supercharged straight-eight engines in either 2.9-litre or 3.2-litre capacities; one in front of and one behind the cockpit. Oddly, rather than using this placement to provide the car with four-wheel-drive, both engines sent power to a mid-mounted differential with twin driveshafts then turning the rear wheels. The result was monstrous power and in a rather portly package. Raced under Formula Libre by Tazio Nuvolari and Louis Chiron rules the cars could indeed run with the Mercedes of Rudolf Caracciola and Luigi Fagioli. At least for the handful of laps before they needed to pit for either tyres or a top-up of fuel. It did however set land speed records for both the flying mile and flying kilometre and is said to be the first car to wear the Ferrari prancing horse emblem.
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Citroën 2CV Sahara
Originally intended for the farming community, the 2CV was adapted to the role of adventurer with the Sahara model. Several hundred were built for the purpose of oil and gas exploration in what were then France’s North African colonies. A boot-mounted engine drove the rear wheels and the front the fronts, both mounted in a strengthened chassis. A single clutch, floor-mounted gearlever and accelerator linked the two engines which were fed by separate fuel tanks under the front seats.
With uprated suspension and still relatively lightweight that car could achieve 60mph off-road with both engines running. However, in the event of a failure of one or in order to save fuel, either engine could be run independently, making the car either front- or rear-wheel-drive. It did cut the top speed to a mere 40mph.
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Mini Moke ‘Twini’
Before it became a quirky Riviera runabout the Mini Moke was created as a low-cost air-droppable alternative to the Jeep for the British Army, using the running gear of the Mini. Lack of both ground clearance and four-wheel-drive made it a non-starter but not before BMC tried to solve the latter problem with a second engine added in the rear and matched to the front one using linked clutches and transmissions.
There were even a couple of twin-engined four-wheel-drive Mini Coopers built on the same principles but with an equal lack of success (John Cooper’s own version put him in hospital after an horrendous crash).
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Lancia Trevi Bimotore
The Lancia 037 was the last rear-wheel-drive car to win the World rally Championship before Audi’s Quattro moved the goalposts for good. Aware that it needed to meet this challenge, Lancia developed a testbed using its sober, front-wheel-drive Trevi saloon. The top of the range variant used a torquey, supercharged, twin-cam, four-cylinder engine driving the front wheels. In order to develop a four-wheel-drive system for the next generation of Lancia rally cars, test driver Giorgio Pianta removed the rear seat of the car and effectively mounted a second front subframe, complete with engine and gearbox in its place.
The car’s rear doors were welded up and large scoops mounted in them to cool the second engine. The two gearboxes were linked mechanically but the engines used a very rudimentary drive-by-wire system which delayed power delivery to the rear axle in an attempt to reduce oversteer. Fast and effective the car was also overweight due to the duplicate mechanics and tended to overheat. It did however help pave the way for the Lancia Delta S4.
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Volkswagen Pikes Peak Golf
Long before Volkswagen decimated the Pikes Peak record with the ID.R the company had its sights set on being the fastest firm up Colorado Springs’ famous hill. It being the mid-1980s, batteries were for Walkmans so in order to give the Golf enough shove to make the pace up the hill, the Ingolstadt engineers simply crammed in another engine behind the front seats, driving the rear wheels. Even doubled up the Oettinger-tuned but naturally aspirated 1.8-litre inline-fours from the Golf GTI ran out of puff as the altitude increased with VW motorsports driver managing third place in 1985, the year Michele Mouton became queen of the climb. A second attempt with a pair of turbocharged Polo powerplants the following year was also unsuccessful.
It was 1987 which saw the full crazy get unleashed. VW wanted the car to look as similar as possible to the showroom models to help boost sales so that ruled out any extreme aero. Instead mechanical grip was sought by building a stock-looking but 20cm wider bodyshell out of Kevlar and installing two turbocharged 1.8-litre GTI engines into an aluminium monocoque for a total of 652 horsepower. The stock(ish) looking Golf was actually fastest up the hill until something broke a few corners from the finish and Audi took the crown again.
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Mercedes A38 AMG
Trust Mercedes to pull off the twin-engine trick in a package that is not only entirely sensible but, thanks to the three letter acronym appended to the model name, also a bit bonkers. The original A-Class was a clever bit of design with a ‘sandwich floor’ that effectively placed the engine below the level of the occupants, the idea being that in the event of a front-end crash it would slide underneath rather than into the cabin. It did also make the car’s centre of gravity rather high, making the car feel like falling over in the presence of large wildlife.
However, what it also meant was that the engineers at AMG could add a second engine to the car underneath the bootfloor. The result, other than some flared wheel arches covering some beefy AMG alloys, which in turn hid E55 AMG brakes, and a dinky roof spoiler, is that the A38 didn’t look all that different from a standard A-Class. However, at the flick of a switch the second engine came into play, driving the rear wheels and doubling the car’s output to 250PS and 359Nm which dropped the 0-60mph time to below six seconds. Reports on how many were built vary but one was gifted to Mika Hakkinen after winning the 1998 Formula 1 championship in a McLaren-Mercedes.
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Which twin-engined mad-machine is your favourite?
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