Duckworth was born in Blackburn, Lancashire, and was educated at Giggleswick School. He served two years of national service with the Royal Air Force, initially training to become a pilot before being grounded for dangerous and incompetent flying and reclassified as a navigator. Duckworth attributed his flying problem to an allergy to medication he was receiving; in civilian life he became a keen light aircraft and helicopter pilot. After completing his service, he studied engineering at Imperial College London, earning a BSc degree in 1955.
After university, Duckworth began working for Lotus as a gearbox engineer. He fell out with Colin Chapman over the unreliability of the "Queerbox": Duckworth believed a specific fix was required, but Chapman would not support its cost.
In 1958, Duckworth and fellow Lotus employee Mike Costin founded Cosworth, a racing engine design and development firm. Costin was initially unable to leave Lotus due to a recently signed restrictive contract, so Duckworth worked essentially alone until Costin could join him. From the outset, the company was closely associated with Ford and Lotus. Early success in the newly formed Formula Junior in the early 1960s financed Cosworth's relocation from Friern Barnet to Edmonton and then to Northampton, and inspired Colin Chapman to persuade Ford to finance production of Duckworth's DFV engine.
Chapman's concept was to reduce weight by using the engine as a stressed part of the chassis, bolted directly to the front monocoque tub, eliminating the need for a spaceframe around the engine and simplifying maintenance. This arrangement has been standard in Formula One ever since.
The DFV made its debut in the third race of the 1967 season, the Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort, in the back of the Lotus 49. Graham Hill took pole position and Jim Clark took the win. Teething problems prevented Clark from mounting a serious championship challenge, but the Lotus-Ford was the class of the field. In 1968, the DFV was made available to all teams; its approximately 400 bhp (298 kW; 406 PS) and relatively low price led to widespread adoption and spawned a generation of small, mainly English-based low-budget teams throughout the 1970s.
The DFV's last win came at the 1983 Detroit Grand Prix, where Italian driver Michele Alboreto drove his Tyrrell 011 to victory. The final podium finish by a DFV-powered car came in 1984, also in Detroit, when Martin Brundle drove his Tyrrell 012 to second place, though Tyrrell were later disqualified from the 1984 season for technical infringements. The DFV's last race was the Austrian Grand Prix on the Österreichring, where Brundle failed to qualify the underpowered car. By 1985 the DFV — upgraded as the DFY — was rated at around 540 bhp (403 kW; 547 PS), but faced turbocharged competition producing around 950 bhp (708 kW; 963 PS) and had become generally uncompetitive.
At the 1984 British Grand Prix at Brands Hatch, Duckworth and Ford agreed to build a turbocharged engine to replace the DFV. Initial testing used an old straight-four sportscar engine, which proved unreliable and unable to produce the required power. After six of the straight-four engines were destroyed in a three-week development period — with turbocharging generating an incurable crankshaft vibration — Duckworth and Ford decided to develop an all-new V6 engine, despite Duckworth having preferred the four-cylinder for its compactness and fuel economy.
The 850 bhp (634 kW; 862 PS) Ford-Cosworth TEC V6 turbo, internally dubbed the GBA, debuted at the 1986 San Marino Grand Prix in the Team Haas (USA) Ltd-entered Lola THL2, driven by 1980 World Champion Alan Jones. The engine was somewhat reliable and smooth for a turbo unit, but was well below the power of its rivals — Honda, BMW, Renault, and TAG-Porsche engines were reportedly producing in excess of 1,000 bhp (746 kW; 1,014 PS). The Haas Lola team scored 8 points during 1986, with Jones's best finish a fourth place at the Austrian Grand Prix; Patrick Tambay finished fifth in the same race, the engine's first points-scoring result.
With the Haas team leaving Formula One at the end of 1986, the GBA V6 was supplied exclusively to Benetton in 1987. A restriction of turbo boost to 4.0 Bar that season made the engine more competitive, though nine engine or turbo-related retirements pointed to reliability concerns. Thierry Boutsen and Teo Fabi each claimed a podium during the year — Fabi at Austria and Boutsen at Australia — and Boutsen briefly led the Mexican Grand Prix. With turbo engines banned by the FIA from 1989, Ford-Cosworth abandoned the V6 at the end of 1987 and focused on the naturally aspirated 3.5-litre DFZ V8, which was raced in 1987 by teams including Tyrrell and the new French Larrousse outfit. The DFZ was a development of the original DFV; Benetton would receive exclusive use of its successor, the DFR, in 1988.
The DFV and engines derived from it became the standard in Formula One and many other forms of racing, and made Duckworth a wealthy man. In 1980, he sold his majority stake in Cosworth for tax reasons but retained his position as chairman. He relinquished the chairmanship to Mike Costin in 1987 for health reasons and was thereafter appointed President, remaining interested in engineering until his death. Duckworth died in Northampton on 19 December 2005.
His son Roger joined Cosworth and worked as a development engineer in the Road Engines division, playing a key role in delivering the YB family of engines used in the Ford Sierra RS Cosworth and Ford Escort RS Cosworth. Roger left Cosworth in 1998 and founded Integral Powertrain Ltd with three former Cosworth colleagues.
This article is based solely on the supplied corpus. No external sources were consulted; claims that could not be substantiated against the corpus were omitted under the drop-the-claim rule.