maserati: revving up mistrals and boras

Traditionally, the 2,500 feet per minute maximum mean piston speed, equivalent to 12.7 meters per second, has been used by Road & Track to establish the maximum cruising speed of an automobile in the Maserati GT heyday of the Fifties and Sixties, as the stress level that the average engine will tolerate for prolonged running. Needless to say, this number is only a heuristic average, and specific engines may well thrive on much higher speeds, or expire well below that limit. Also, owing to the geometrical fact that, for any given mean piston speed, the rate of piston acceleration is usually lower in the long-stroke design, long-stroke undersquare engines such as the Maserati I-6 tend to accept higher piston speeds than those designed with an oversquare bore to stroke ratio of a Maserati V-8. ( Read more... )