Internal combustion engines are one of the places where pressure relief valves are absolutely critical as they need to manage the hot gases that drive the engine and generate power.
There are several failures that have been caused by inadequate venting of these gases, particularly when the culprit is poor design. Arguably the worst example of how poor valve and vent design can affect a car is in the worst motorsport engine ever created, the Life V12.
The engine was a design owned by Life Racing Engines, a Formula One racing team that was in operation for just one year, failing to even qualify for qualification, let alone start a race.
The origin of the engine came from Franco Rocchi, an engineer who had worked for the motoring company Ferrari and designed an unusual W12 engine that theoretically had the power of a V12 engine but was as compact as a V8.
The entrepreneur Ernesto Vita commissioned the consultant engineer to turn the concept into a full engine, with the idea that the businessman would sell it to an F1 team looking for a new engine in the wake of a major change in the rules.
No team wanted it, so he also bought a car design to put the engine into, in order to provide a demonstration of its capabilities. In a way, it did, although not in any good way.
It was heavy, unreliable, ran extremely hot due to its design and lack of either effective cooling or relief valves, and was extraordinarily slow. Some estimates claimed it generated barely over half the power of other engines in the racing series.
It failed to get out of the pre-qualifying stage of the race weekend, at one point having a qualifying lap that was five minutes slower than the rest of the field, and eventually gave up on using its own engine, relying on a more conventional Judd V8 before leaving entirely.
