COSTA Rigeli founded his automotive company in Tuscany, Italy in 2015. Costa grew up on a diet of V8 Formula One in the 90s and his father’s British roadster racing career throughout his childhood. Costa knew he wanted to make sports cars, but he wanted his cars to be something unique. Traditionally, the roadster chassis is fitted with an inline 4 cylinder engine. These engines are often underwhelming in both performance and sound output. It’s for this reason that people love to customise their roadsters by putting big, heavy v8 engines in place of the four pot powerplant. Often this comes at a cost to handling and weight distribution because big v8 weigh a lot more than a typical 4 cylinder. With this in mind, Costa’s idea was to combine this mentality of putting v8 power into a roadster, whilst retaining the brilliant and fun handling characteristics roadsters are known for. To achieve this, Costa knew that the best way was to design a small capacity, high revving v8 engine similar to what was used in the v8 era F1 cars. In order to maintain good fuel economy and still make good power, a twin turbo system would be utilised and the engine would run on at least 98 octane unleaded fuel. It was important to Costa’s vision to make the engine as high revving as possible, to give the car a unique, F1 style scream. The result is the first car produced by Rigeli: The Ventoso.
Edit: I would have liked a little more customisation for this MX-5/Miata style body to set it apart a little. Perhaps if someone makes a more generic and customisable roadster body down the track, I can make it look a little more unique and Italian 
Edit 2: As mentioned (again, in an edit) in my last post, I had a mishap with the original Ventoso engine. In the end I started from scratch and now it’s even better, so I’m glad for the mishap now.
If you don’t want to scroll up and down to compare the old with the new, here are the notable improvements:
- Longer, smoother power band where power now sits between 190 and 200kw from 7500rpm right up to 9500rpm instead of only reaching it’s peak in the last thousand rpm before redline.
- Big gains in torque whilst sacrificing only 5kw of power, and the torque peak comes on 300rpm sooner than the previous engine
- Much better engine response
- Better fuel economy
- Lower emissions
- Better reliability
- Runs quieter (until the bypass valves open of course
) - Still running a forged bottom end, excluding pistons. Why? because, were this a real car, I would want to avoid “piston slap” when cruising around town at low RPM (yes I know piston slap isn’t a “thing” in Automation, at least not yet, but it’s a realistic consideration)
Downsides:
- Service costs are up significantly over the previous engine
- Engine size and weight have increased slightly due to the addition of direct injection. DI also contributes to the service cost mentioned above.
Even with service costs and size gains considered, I think this engine is a major improvement over the original specimen. Now I just need to shave a bit more weight off the car’s body to try and get it closer to that 1000kg sweet spot!
