Obsession: Mr. Singh's Search for the Holy Grail

Squish! A laughably simple idea with a laughable name, but now almost every one of the billions of internal combustion engines operating around the planet employ some version of it—including virtually every engine Singh ever straddled in his 30 years in motorsports.


Singh knew that to get his precious speed he had to fire the heart of the engine, the center of its mystery: the combustion chamber. It was here that fuel was turned to bang—and here that the efficiency of that bang had stalled out at around 28 percent. The vast majority of the fuel was dissipated as engine heat or exhaust.


In the history of automobiles, manufacturers had experimented with all sorts of shapes and valve arrangements to improve efficiency, but nobody had ever dramatically altered the surface
of the chamber itself—perhaps, Singh reasoned, because engineers couldn’t see inside its metal walls and eyeball
its forces. The combustion chamber was a mystery
shrouded in plate steel. The very soul of the engine appeared ripe for improvement.



“From the beginning of time, whatever I did was geared toward taking an engine, polishing the rough edges out of it, and getting some more performance from it,” Singh remembers. “And I certainly knew that it was not God who was manufacturing these engines in a factory. It was just human beings, men set on a time frame, assembling parts. So there is, then, great room to improve.”

Singh needed his engines to work as efficiently as possible—he wanted the fuel to burn cleanly and under the
maximum compression. But like most tuners, he had run up against compression’s upper limit, above which pockets of unburned fuel explode spontaneously, or “knock,” under the pressure. He knew that the flame front from the spark plugs wasn’t reaching all the fuel at the edges of the cylinders.


One way to fight knock is with high-octane gasoline, which racers in countries like India have no access to. If Singh wanted more compression, he’d have to decipher the problem his way. So he started imagining: “My whole thing was, how on earth could one do something to mix it better?”

The simplest answer was Ricardo’s squish, which Singh, like many tuners before him, maximized into a sort of supersquish by making the rising piston head come as close as possible to the squish band. But the knock just got worse; either the chaos of the supersquish turbulence was too much, or the exploding hydrocarbons he was hearing were trapped inside the squish band, isolated from the spreading flame at the point farthest from the spark plug. The compression was stagnating his air-fuel mix. He needed to stir it up, to make that eddied, fractal fuse between the edge of the squish band and the center of the spark.


And so, armed with this intuition and a toolbox, Singh scratched his own small mark on Ricardo’s 100-year-old concept—through the squish band from the cylinder edge to the spark plug. Then he scratched another, and another. The first channels were shallow, and they quickly filled with hydrocarbons. Tentatively, he made them deeper. “We were very scared,” Singh confesses, and as he says it he sets down his nub of chalk in favor of a Gold Flake cigarette. “Maybe we were actually putting an induced crack into the head.”

But the engine didn’t crack. It changed. The compression went up, but the engine noise went down. And it seemed to be using less fuel: Measuring with a drip syringe and a stopwatch, Singh determined that it was between 10 and 20 percent less. “Most definitely and immediately, sir, something was very different,” he says. “My combustion was so stable that I could bring the idling down to such a point that you could actually count the blades on the fan as it turned.”

He felt the exhaust with his bare hand and noticed that it was running cooler. Yet when he removed the spark plug, he discovered that it had become blue, apparently from intense combustion-chamber heat. And when he ran his finger along the inside of the exhaust pipe, he noticed something else, or
a lack of it: unburned hydrocarbons. His engine seemed to
be running cleaner. In automotive terms, his squish-band channels seemed to have maximized combustion by propagating the laminar flame front from the spark plug to the edges of the cylinder at its top dead-center position, converting more fuel to expanding gases and piston work while avoiding the spontaneous combustion of unburned hydrocarbon emissions. In layman’s terms, they boomed better.


So much better, in fact, that he was able to keep his car in fourth gear at 500 rpms without sputtering or pinging, even while navigating the local congestion of bullock carts, rickshaws, bikes and cars. His engine ran so slow that it nearly didn’t need the gearing of a transmission—thus, “direct drive.”

He modified a motorcycle, then a two-stroke, then a four-stroke, then a car, then 50 cars. Finally he borrowed money from his mother-in-law and bought a spanking-new Tata
Indica in which to showcase his design. He decorated it with “direct drive” in stick-on letters on the steering wheel and a bull’s head above the grill. Then he tested his idea on a few customers, including N. Bhanutej, a writer for a national weekly newsmagazine who owns a pokey 1.2-liter Fiat Palio.


“Essentially, the whole car changed,” Bhanutej recounts. “It was zippier. And in third gear I could slow down to 20 kph with no engine knock, then press the petrol and just speed up smoothly, like you would in first gear.” He also found that his modified engine was strangely quiet. “At the stops, I sometimes needed to peek at the dashboard to make sure
it was still running. It seemed like a different car.” The mechanic at Bhanutej ’s Fiat dealership thought so too. “He told me it was impossible for this type of car to perform this well,” Bhanutej says. “He kept asking about fuel additives.”

Singh seemed to be onto something. Although he couldn’t prove scientifically that it worked, he felt sure that it did. Certainly, it was novel—Singh applied for a patent in January 1999, and the U.S. Patent Office issued him No. 6237579 in May 2001. Two months after his application hit the patent office Web site, engineers from General Electric applied for a nearly identical patent for an aftermarket design, which they claimed, as Singh had, would result in increased turbulence, and thus better fuel efficiency, with fewer emissions.


“It’s very interesting, I think, that General Electric developed this idea after my patent became public,” Singh says with a smile. “But their design is very stupid. An add-on will never survive the intense forces of the combustion chamber. If I had come up with this idea, I would have been too embarrassed to tell anybody about it, let alone apply for the patent.”

This roadside mechanic in Mysore had seemingly beaten a billion-dollar R&D department. But what had he actually invented? Did it really work? Singh had his patent and his prototype. Now all that remained was to introduce his invention to the world.
So Singh wrote letters—dozens upon dozens of letters, each accompanied by an 8 x 10 glossy of his spark plugs. He wrote to presidents Clinton and Bush, to no effect. He wrote to Tony Blair and got a nice thank-you form on
10 Downing Street stationery. (“The British are a different lot,” he says proudly. “They respond to a letter.”) He wrote to
President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam of India and received a series of letters and promises for follow-up, none of which bore
fruit. He wrote to auto manufacturers from Dearborn to Pune, from Ford to Tata Motors. Tata, an Indian car company, expressed interest in the vague, noncommittal way that Singh had come to recognize as a mannered blow-off; Ford responded with a note wishing him “good luck,” which Singh didn’t much like, and the recommendation that he submit
his “suggestion” through the company’s dedicated Web site
(fordnewideas.com), which he liked even less.