Fire moottorin historia

The engine used in the Cinquecento Sporting is an 1108cc version of Fiat's F.I.R.E. engine which produces an adequate 54 horsepower at 5500rpm and 63lbs/ft of torque at 3250rpm. Mechanically it is a simple and yet innovative five bearing, eight valve, overhead cam design, which has almost none of the modern over-complications such as shaft or harmonic balancer's which find their way onto so many of todays engines. This modern design originated in the 1980's from a percieved need which Fiat had to replace the then long in the tooth 903cc pushrod unit which dated from the late 1950's and which had been installed in almost every small Fiat including such greats as the 600, 850, 127 (mk1,2 & 3), Panda, Uno, Y10, however, this unit still lives on in the standard Cinquecento S and SX (and now Seicento) in 899cc capacity due to the implementation of hydraulic tappet adjustment, modern emission control equipment featuring 3-way catalytic converter/ECU controlled electronic ignition/single point fuel injection plus many other smaller improvements, of course the underlying reason for the continued production of the 899cc unit is its low production cost and robust design two points which obviously havent gone un-noticed by Fiat and are vital to the production of the reliable low cost cars for which they are so famous.

F.I.R.E. stands for Fully Integrated Robotised Engine and when launched was hailed as a major step forwards in production technology being some 10% lighter and also utilising some 30% fewer parts than its predecessor. One of the main design briefs for this engine was the necessity to be assembled in one of the modern Fiat robot assembly plants using the Robogate system to keep costs as low as possible. In addition to this its cross-flow ohc design had to be more efficient giving reductions in fuel consumption and increases in power and torque over the existing 903cc push-rod engine which went into many small Fiats at that time, added to all the above design needs were allowances which had to be made for longer periods between servicing and when finally required, ease of operation to reduce servicing times, resulting in minimized operating costs and off-road time for the end user.

The 1108cc Fire engine as used in the Sporting can also be found in the Punto 55 model and is mechanically identical even down to the fact that the two cars also share the same gearbox meaning that it should be quite possible to create a 6 speed Cinquecento by using the transmission from a Punto ELX..... also nearly identical is the 1242cc Fire engine used in the later Punto 60 models and I also understand it is possible to fit the 1.2 16v 'Super FIRE' engine as used in the later Sporting version's of the mk1 Punto. Obviously though the further you deviate from the original installation the greater the number of modifications and custom fabricated parts that will be required.