As they approached the elevated bay, Marcus could smell the distinct, sharp aroma of stale Castrol R bean oil—the vegetable-based racing lubricant favored by European engine builders in the 1960s. It was a scent that never completely left cast iron, even after half a century of cold dormancy.
Mounted into the tubular space-frame chassis was a long, narrow powerplant that looked completely foreign to anything Marcus had seen in textbooks. It was an inline six-cylinder engine, but tilted aggressively at a forty-five-degree angle toward the right chassis rail to lower the center of gravity. Three enormous, twin-choke side-draft Weber carburetors hung off the intake side like a bank of bronze artillery barrels.
"A 1968 Heilbrown Formula Two prototype," Vance explained, stopping at the edge of the lift. "Built in a backyard shed in Graz, Austria, by an eccentric engineer named Anton Heilbrown. Only three were ever cast. It features double overhead camshafts driven not by a timing belt or a chain, but by a vertical cascade of eleven straight-cut spur gears housed in a magnesium front cover."
Vance picked up a heavy, leather-bound workshop manual from a nearby stainless steel rolling bench and let it fall onto the metal top with a resounding thud.
"Anton Heilbrown died in a testing crash at the Nürburgring in the autumn of sixty-eight," Vance continued. "The car was crated up and hidden in a salt mine near Salzburg to avoid estate creditors. I bought it fifteen years ago. Since then, four separate vintage restoration specialists have attempted to start this engine. All four failed."
Marcus stepped up onto the platform. He ran his hand over the bare aluminum cam covers. The metal was cool, smooth, and etched with the initials AH in script.
"What happened when they tried?" Marcus asked.
"The first team, out of Zurich, managed to get it to turn over, but the moment the engine caught, the timing gears tore themselves to pieces," Vance said, his voice tightening with lingering disgust. "Cost me eighty thousand dollars to have new spur gears precision-hobbed from nickel-chromium steel. The second team couldn't establish oil pressure. The third team got it running for thirty seconds, but the exhaust temperature on cylinder three spiked past twelve hundred degrees Fahrenheit, melted the crown of a custom forged Mahle piston, and locked the crank solid."
Vance pointed down at the engine block.
"The engine has been completely rebuilt. The block has been ultrasonically cleaned. The clearances are set to factory specifications within three ten-thousandths of an inch. New custom pistons were forged in England. The Weber carburetors were flow-tested on a wet bench in Indianapolis. It was finished three weeks ago."
Vance reached out, resting his palm on the magnesium cam cover.
"Yesterday afternoon, before I drove down to Prestige Auto Works to deal with Harold Grimes's incompetence on my father's 911, my chief estate engineer tried to start this car. The starter engaged. The oil pressure reached sixty pounds. The carburetors squirted raw fuel. But the engine kicked back violently against the starter ring gear, bent the Bendix drive shaft, and refused to fire. My engineer packed his tool chests, told me the engine was possessed by the ghost of Anton Heilbrown, and quit."
Marcus looked around the immaculate workspace. Behind the platform stood a massive Snap-on double-bay tool cabinet finished in matte slate gray. Every drawer was lined with shadow foam, holding precision torque wrenches, micrometers, dial indicators, and German hand tools that looked as if they had never touched a speck of dirt.
Marcus didn't touch the tools. Instead, he pulled the sleeves of his charcoal hoodie up to his elbows, exposing his thin, sinewy forearms.
"May I touch it?" Marcus asked.
Vance stepped back and crossed his arms. "The contract began forty minutes ago, Marcus. You have the run of the bay."
Marcus walked around the engine block slowly, circling it like an animal sizing up a competitor.
He didn't pull a spark plug. He didn't hook up a battery charger.
He reached down to the front of the crankshaft, where an old-fashioned square-drive lug protruded from the vibration damper. He picked up a long, half-inch breaker bar from the bench, slotted the correct twenty-four-millimeter socket onto the end, and seated it onto the crank bolt.
Marcus braced his feet on the slate tiles, put his right hand on the breaker bar, and leaned his body weight into the lever.
He rotated the engine clockwise. Slowly.
Clack... huff... hiss.
The resistance built as the pistons rose against their compression strokes, then eased as the exhaust valves cracked open. The straight-cut timing gears inside the magnesium case let out a high-pitched, metallic whine: whine-click-whine-click.
Marcus rotated it through two complete revolutions—seven hundred and twenty degrees of crankshaft travel.
He closed his eyes.
To the untrained eye, Marcus looked like a boy playing with a wrench. But inside Marcus’s mind, a three-dimensional blueprint was running in real time. He wasn't feeling the weight of the steel bar; he was feeling the friction of the piston skirts against the cross-hatch hone of the cylinder bores. He was feeling the lash between the eleven spur gears in the timing chest. He was listening to the breath of the valves opening and closing against their bronze seats.
At three hundred and forty degrees on the second rotation, just before the compression stroke on cylinder number one, Marcus felt something wrong.
It wasn't a grind. It wasn't a binding metal-on-metal lock.
It was a hesitation. A microscopic, rubbery drag that lasted for less than five degrees of rotation, accompanied by a sound so faint that the ambient hum of the underfloor heating nearly swallowed it entirely.
Tink.
A tiny, hollow metallic tick.
Marcus stopped the breaker bar instantly. He backed the crank up ten degrees, then pushed it forward again.
Tink.
Marcus opened his eyes. He let go of the wrench, left it hanging from the crank snout, and walked to the intake side of the engine where the trio of dual-throat Weber carburetors hung from their curved cast-aluminum manifolds.
He reached up, grabbed the throttle lever on the center carburetor, and flicked it open.
Snap. The return spring pulled the brass butterfly valves shut with a sharp, clean sound.
Marcus shook his head. "The carburetors aren't synchronized."
Vance stepped forward, a crease appearing between his eyes. "That's impossible. They were flow-balanced on a digital calibrated flow bench in Indiana. I have the certification sheet in the binder."
"The bench tested them off the car, Mr. Vance," Marcus replied calmly. "They tested them on a flat, level plate. Look at how they’re mounted here."
Marcus pointed a slender, steady finger at the intermediate linkage rod connecting the center carburetor to the front and rear units.
"This engine sits tilted at forty-five degrees," Marcus explained. "When you mount these carburetors at an angle to clear the low hood, the weight of the brass throttle shafts binds against the bronze bushings inside the bodies. The center carburetor opens half a millimeter before the other two. When the engine cranks, cylinder three and four are sucking full vacuum while cylinder one and six are suffocating. But that’s not what bent your starter."
"Then what bent the starter?" Vance asked, his voice razor-sharp.
Marcus reached out and tapped the cylindrical black distributor cap mounted at the very back of the cylinder head, driven directly off the end of the exhaust camshaft.
"Your previous mechanics timed the spark using the marks on the flywheel," Marcus said.
"That is standard procedure for every internal combustion engine on earth," Vance countered.
"Yes, sir," Marcus nodded. "Except Anton Heilbrown didn't use a standard chain drive. He used an odd number of spur gears in the timing case. Eleven gears."
Marcus turned to face Vance, his dark eyes ablaze with that terrifyingly pure mechanical logic that defied his fifteen years.
"Every time you mesh two spur gears together, the direction of rotation reverses. One gear spins clockwise; the second spins counter-clockwise; the third spins clockwise. If you have eleven gears in the train between the crankshaft and the camshaft, the exhaust camshaft isn't spinning in reverse. It's spinning in the same direction as the crank."
Vance went completely still.
Marcus picked up a yellow grease pencil from the rolling cart. He drew a quick, crude diagram directly onto the clean slate floor: eleven tiny interlocking circles, followed by two arrows.
"A standard Bosch distributor for an inline-six turns clockwise," Marcus continued, his hand moving with fluid confidence. "Because the drive gear on the end of this camshaft spins the opposite way of what normal production cars do, Anton Heilbrown had to have a special, reverse-rotation distributor drive gear made. Look at that distributor cap."
Marcus pointed to the firing order stamped into the black Bakelite plastic: 1 - 5 - 3 - 6 - 2 - 4.
"Your mechanics set the plug wires clockwise according to the manual," Marcus said quietly. "Because the rotor inside is turning counter-clockwise, the spark isn't firing at ten degrees before top dead center on the compression stroke. It’s firing eighty degrees early—right as the piston is flying upward at full speed. The explosion is trying to drive the piston backward against the direction of the starter. That’s why it kicked back. That’s why it bent the shaft. And that’s why cylinder three melted for the other team."
Marcus dropped the grease pencil back onto the cart and dusted his hands on his jeans.
"You're not firing an engine, Mr. Vance," Marcus concluded. "You've been detonating a bomb inside your own cylinders."