Mercedes Built An Upside Down V12 That Powered Hitler's Deadliest Fighter

The engine hung upside down . Not from a bad install, not from a mistake on the line , but by design, exactly the way Daimler-Benz drew it . The crankshaft sat on top, the cylinders pointed at the ground . In 1942, inside a factory hidden in a forest south of Berlin , the company was turning out a 35.7 L inverted V12 that ran the wrong way up and ran better for it . It was called the DB 605 . It went into the nose of the Messerschmitt Bf 109 , the fighter that became the backbone of the Luftwaffe , and it sat behind the gun sight of Erich Hartmann , who shot down 352 aircraft and is still the deadliest fighter pilot who ever lived, by almost every measure that should have mattered . It was one of the finest aero engines of the war, and by the end of that same war , the people in charge of it had settled on a name for it. They called it the sick engine. . So, here is the question this whole video turns on . How does an engine assembled upside down become the most produced engine Germany made , fly behind history's highest scoring aces, and then quietly fail the men flying behind it ? The answer runs through fuel, through metal , through one stubborn decision about which way an engine should face , and through a darkness at the end that has nothing to do with engineering at all . This is Machine Titans, where we take one machine apart to find the idea hiding inside it . If that is your kind of thing, subscribe and ride along . The story did not start with the DB 605