Automotive

How Well Do You Know Your Air-Cooled Boxers? A Little Contest!


Illustration for article titled How Well Do You Know Your Air-Cooled Boxers? A Little Contest!

Image: Jason Torchinsky

Guess what? It’s the first Thursday of Spring! You know what that means, right? Of course you do: it’s the day we celebrate horizontally-opposed engines that are cooled by air, as decreed by St. Mornish the Clammy in 1583, inspired by a prescient dream where pairs of salt pork barrels smacked their blunt ends into one another during a tornado. So, to celebrate Mornishmas, why don’t you see how many of these air-cooled boxer engines you can identify?

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I always liked the general look of air-cooled boxer engines; compared to the mainstream inline or V-type liquid-cooled engines, air-cooled boxers generally look oddly compact and upright, often with big curvy fan shrouds and visibly finned cylinders.

These types of engines all sort of resemble one another in general ways; they’re all clearly part of a strange siblinghood that spans time and space. If you’re not really familiar with them, they can be sort of hard to tell apart, which is the whole point of this.

So, with that in mind, look at those eight engines; they’re from a number of countries, and they vary in cylinder count from two to six.

Should I give you a list of the engines? Or would that make it too easy? Yeah, what the hell—if it was any other website’s audience, I’d say yeah, but you kooks? I bet you don’t need it.

And how about this? First one to get them all right (based on time stamp in comments) will get a car of their choice, drawn by me, and sent to them, digitally, because traditionally we’ve been slow/awful at mailing physical prizes. But this I can do.

So! Who’s feeling clever, in a very, very specific way?

Good luck!

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