Forty years ago, Matty Holtzberg, a young car enthusiast with a burning curiosity, visited the Hackensack, New Jersey, public library for a little light reading. His discovery - a technical journal article about a new plastic so robust that it could be used inside a car engine - set the course for his life's work. And thanks to Holtzberg's perseverance, the way car engines are produced may be drastically changed.
Holtzberg soon obtained a sample of the fantastic French-engineered plastic and tried it out. He had the slug of material machined in the shape of a piston which he installed in a friend's Austin Mini for a trial by fire. Amazingly, the engine started and ran for several minutes before the heat of combustion flambéed a hole in its crown.
Undaunted, Holtzberg pressed on. During the 1970s, he manufactured and sold plastic connecting rods to racers wishing to extend their rpm reach with the lightest possible reciprocating parts and plastic pistons, now equipped with heat-resistant aluminum crowns. His parts worked as intended.
In 1979, with backing from Amoco Chemical, he founded Polimotor - short for polymer motor - to engineer the first composite-plastic-intensive engine. Holtzberg's seminal design was, in effect, a clone of that day's Ford Pinto 2.3-liter four-cylinder. Instead of the production engine's cast-iron block and SOHC head, Holtzberg's design incorporated reinforced plastic for the block walls, piston skirts, connecting rods, oil pan, and portions of the cylinder head. Bore surfaces, piston crowns, and combustion-chamber liners were iron or aluminum. The crankshaft and camshaft were standard Ford production components. The weight savings was phenomenal: compared to the stock 88-horsepower Pinto engine's 415 pounds, Holtzberg's engine weighed less than 200 pounds.
AUTOMOTIVE INDUSTRIES magazine reported on this development shortly after Holtzberg's first engine ran in a 1980 cover story. By the time Popular Science picked up the scent two years later with a second cover story, he had gone beyond Pinto power to build a twin-cam, 16-valve racing engine that produced 300 horsepower and weighed 152 pounds. With Amoco backing, his team campaigned a Lola T-616 in IMSA's Camel Lights road racing series, scoring two third place finishes during the 1984 and 1985 seasons. The only catastrophic failure occurred when inadequate lubrication resulted in a thrown connecting rod during a race at Watkins Glen. That particular part was a metal design purchased from a respectable supplier. ...next page >>