4304R Ebay listing

[GavinT]

Amedee Gordini was essentially gone by the time the R16TS came out and it's not like a 'hemi' combustion chamber was a new idea. Amedee died in 1979.
At that point in time, it's well documented that Renault had taken over the Gordini work and folded it into their newly minted 'Renault Sport' division.

That's not to say that Amedee wasn't a clever and important guy. He was, and receives less recognition than perhaps is fair, but most of his fame was earned much earlier in the 50's with Simca.
But the Gordini history is better known in French circles and Renault were smart enough to keep the 'Gordini' badge on their sporting cars as a result. I recall Renault even used the 'Gordini' branding on cam covers of relatively recent F1 engines.

Back when the Renault 12 Gordini was produced, six were delivered here to Australia for the factory supported rallying effort. They arrived as 125HP (10.25 compression) vehicles and with the 160HP kit in the boot/trunk.

I'm rambling . . but, if anything, Alpine arguably did more development work on the humble cross flow engine than Renault Sport, although, with that said, the 807 G4 16 valve engine was pretty fine.
For context, it's important to remember that both Gordini and Alpine were essentially Renault 'tuners'.
Renault eventually bought Alpine too, just like Ford purchased Cosworth.

[jbcollier]

Renault bought Gordini as well.  Gordini did amazing things before the time of "scientific" tuning when tuning was more of an art -- thus the moniker "Sorcerer".  By the mid-60s and on, his engines were not producing what others were and he was shunted to the side by Renault.  He had some odd ideas, not the least of which was having the spark plug in it's own chamber with two narrow passages to the combustion chamber -- a poor man's twin plug?  Of course, twin plugging was an attempt to solve issues of poor combustion chamber design.

Don't get me wrong, the early tuners did amazing work and there was very little actually known about combustion processes at the time.  Lots of big companies made a real hash of their tuning as well.  The step to four valves was problematic for many as it wasn't the number of valves that was the real step forward but the introduction of swirling of the intake mix.  Ducati, the big Japanese 3 and others all made a hash of it at first.

[TurboFource]

Larry Widmer has some interesting designs and theories on the combustion process.