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Image: - Mr Aldo Marangoni, FPT Vice President Product Engineering

What a year it has been for the Fiat Group. With the Italians already having secured Best Performance Engine for Ferrari, and no less than three Awards for the TwinAir, everybody’s favourite two-cylinder turbo has now scooped the big one for the engineers in Turin, marking a first for Fiat. The 2011 International Engine of the Year is the 875cc Fiat TwinAir powertrain.

It’s only the second time – the first was Toyota’s 1-litre Yaris VVT-i back in 1999 – that a sub-1-litre engine has taken the big prize. But given how innovative this powerplant is, the result should come as no surprise. Who better to describe this frugal, fun motor than its program manager, Gianni Mastrangelo: “We wanted an engine to fully demonstrate our downsizing capabilities and we needed a displacement that could fully exploit our MultiAir system,” he explains. “We concluded that a two-cylinder, 875cc setup with a turbo was capable of realising all our development targets.”

The TwinAir was designed from a blank sheet of paper. Indeed, Mastrangelo says that only a few screws were carried over from the FIRE 1.2-litre four-cylinder. “There were lots of problems to be solved during this project, keeping in mind that this architecture was new,” he recalls. “The most important challenge to overcome was integrating the MultiAir system within the two-cylinder activation unit. Plus, we wanted the NVH of the TwinAir to be at least as good as that of a four-cylinder engine.”

That Mastrangelo’s team more than succeeded in meeting its goals is borne out in TwinAir’s performance at this year’s awards. A crushing points victory among the European judges laid the foundation for its triumph in the overall International Engine of the Year voting. A solid endorsement from judges elsewhere in the world then enabled it to hold off the ever-popular Volkswagen TSI Twincharger, bidding for a third straight win. Congratulations, Fiat!