Melling Consultancy Design, (MCD)
His team played a part in TWR's V12 engine which helped Jaguar win Le Mans four years on the run, and he has always wanted his own car in the world's most exciting road race. "The sale of the Hellcat would enable me to take a team to Le Mans but doing so has proved elusive" he said.
Rochdale based MCD designed the AJP8 and AJP6 which TVR developed into the TVR Speed Six engine – a high-torque, 24 valve canted straight six – which was cheaper to produce and more refined for road cars. Although TVR carried out further extensive in house development of the engines, these landmark power plants proved that MCD could finally produce an engine. MCD's work ranged from outboard motors and motorcycle engines to the still born Formula One engine. The F1 engine, which features four vales and three tiny MCD designed spark plugs per cylinder, fell behind in its schedule leading to the Mastercard Lola formula one team not qualifying for the 1997 season.
Designer Al Melling and his team of skilled draftsmen have tried promising F1 engine designs on several occasions. Working for Scott Russell Engines, a conventional 90-degree V8 was built and tested but never got into a Grand Prix car. Another design, purely on paper, was to have been a wide 165-degree angle V12 to be built with General Motors support but GM withdrew and the project died. Melling's V10 design that was ultimately intended for the MasterCard Lola GP unfortunately never appeared in 1997 leaving the team to run with customer Ford EC V8 engines. This project sank together with the Lola GP team in the beginning of 1997.
In the late 90's, Norton Motorcycles, Inc. utilized the classic Norton name and had at its heart one of Al Melling's engines designed to be innovative, powerful and reliable. The power output figures for both the Nemesis and its cruiser-like sibling, the Nirvana reflected Norton's focus on the power and efficiency in its engine designs. The sport-oriented Nemesis contained a 1500 cc V8 engine with a claimed 235 horsepower (175 kW) and 111 foot-pounds force (150 N·m) of torque. This horsepower figure significantly surpassed the horsepower-per-litre derived from Yamaha's R-1, for example. Unfortunately, like many of Al Melling's ventures, the project was under resourced and subsequently shelved before full production was achieved. The Norton name has since been resurrected by an entirely new consortium which plan to see the brand back in showrooms and race circuits.
Al Melling has long dreamt of owning the TVR brand and in 2007 made an attempt to bid for it. A successful bid may have created a platform for the production of the Hellcat.
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