“We need to know how to react to changes in the market,” explains Willoughby. “We have to be a bit diversified and understand how our skillset maps into the market, and where it has value.”
As he speaks, Willoughby is forced to raise his voice over the deafening growl of a Gordon Murray V12 that’s running in the adjacent test bay – a neat metaphor for Cosworth’s eggs-in-many-baskets approach.
Small wonder that the people responsible for these screaming mechanical marvels should be exploring ways of keeping their crankshafts spinning into the future.
From the dark and deafening confines of the test benches that are little changed since the company’s early days, we are ushered down a hallway to the final assembly suite, which is comparatively blinding in its surgical spotlessness and lays bare the scale, significance and splendour of Cosworth’s latest generation of combustion engines.
Perhaps it’s the relative mundanity of its surroundings that so emphasises the ludicrous proportions of Bugatti’s new V16, but you get the sense that this is a powerplant conceived to draw the eye organically even when removed from the multimillion-pound missile in which it will be mounted.
Even if you have only the vaguest inkling of which bit does what in an engine, there is pleasure to be drawn from the granite-hewn quality of the components used here, the attention to detail in linking them all together and the sheer size of what they constitute when they are united.
This 8.3-litre lump is so colossal that you don’t so much casually glance around it as embark upon a lap of it: comparisons with the likes of the Rolls-Royce Merlin and the Beast of Turin’s flame-spitting 28-litre motor feel more than appropriate.
Our request to fire the engine up in situ is wrongly assumed to be a joke and laughed off, but videos from testing confirm that it sounds about as biblically cataclysmic as you would expect: guttural and booming, with a baritone bark that spirals upwards in pitch as it approaches its 9000rpm redline.
