The 3.4-liter GA was based on the Ford Essex block and was intended for use in touring car racing (Group 2).

To the public, the Cosworth GBA was marketed as the Ford TEC, TEC-Turbo, or TEC-F1; he also appeared in the entry lists for Formula 1 races.

With 155 world championship races won, 12 drivers' and 10 constructors' titles between the DFV's winning debut with Jim Clark and Lotus at the 1967 Dutch Grand Prix and the DFY's final win at Detroit in 1983, it is the most successful engine in the history of Formula One.

Ford remains, to this day, the 3rd most successful engine manufacturer in F1 history behind Mercedes and Ferrari despite leaving the sport in 2004.

A supercharged version of the DFV was created at Cosworth; however, this engine, called DFX, with a displacement of 2.65 liters was only intended for US racing series (CART).

In Formula One, on the other hand, the company stayed with the naturally aspirated engine concept for a long time.

And by 2/3's of the way through the season the DFY was gone altogether with Minardi switching to the Italian made Motori Moderni V6 turbo by Round 3 of the season and Tyrrell from Round 7 using the French Renault turbos in at least one of its two cars, and by the 1985 Dutch Grand Prix, 18 years after the DFV's debut, the engine was gone from Formula One.

To highlight the speed difference between the DFY and the turbos, during qualifying for the 1985 French Grand Prix at the Circuit Paul Ricard, on the tracks 1.8 km (1.1 mi) long Mistral Straight, Swiss driver Marc Surer clocked what was at the time the highest speed recorded by a Formula One car when he pushed his turbocharged, Brabham-BMW to 335 km/h (208 mph).

This compared to the slowest car in the race, the lone naturally aspirated Tyrrell Ford-Cosworth DFY of Stefan Bellof which could only manage 277 km/h (172 mph).

Its only entrant, the Tyrrell 012 of British driver Martin Brundle, failed to qualify at the 1985 Austrian Grand Prix held at the high speed Österreichring, a track that highlighted outright power and by this stage the more powerful turbos of BMW, Ferrari and Renault were pushing out well over 1,100 bhp (820 kW; 1,115 PS) in qualifying, over twice the amount of the 530 bhp (395 kW; 537 PS) rated DFY.

Because of Duckworth's hesitant attitude, Ford temporarily considered cooperation with the German company in this area Racing team Zakspeed, who had experience with turbocharged engines for more than ten years.

When Duckworth finally agreed to develop a turbo engine in the summer of 1984, Ford decided to continue working with Cosworth.

Development work on the Cosworth Turbo began in the fall of 1984 when all of the top teams had turbocharged engines.

Two months later the engine made its debut in a Formula One race at the 1986 San Marino Grand Prix with 1980 World Drivers' Champion, Australia's Alan Jones at the wheel.

Jones qualified in 21st place but failed to finish the race due to overheating, the result of a holed radiator.

There were two overhead camshafts for each bank of cylinders, driven by chains for the first time since the Repco engines of the late 1960s.

For the years 1986 to 1988, Ford awarded the engine exclusively to Team Haas (USA), based in Colnbrook near Heathrow in west London.

Cosworth was critical of the decision because while Haas had a solid history in American CART racing (indeed, the Newman/Haas Racing team's CART driver was no less than 1978 Formula One World Champion Mario Andretti), its Formula One debut would not be until late in the 1985 season.

The TEC made its debut in the 1986 San Marino Grand Prix with Team Haas (USA), alternatively referred to in the media as Haas-Lola, Beatrice, Beatrice-Lola, or FORCE-Lola.

The team only had one of the new THL2 cars available with Jones getting the drive while Tambay had to race the old Hart powered THL1 one last time.

At Imola the new THL2 with its Ford engine was clearly inferior to the old THL1 with the team finally getting some good speed from the Hart turbo in its swansong race.

In the race, Jones retired after 28 laps with an overheated engine caused by a stone punching a hole in one of the car's radiators.

In the US, Eddie Cheever took over instead the second car from Haas (and proved faster, as Tambay would during most qualifying sessions, than an increasingly demotivated Jones who later admitted he really only ever signed to race F1 again for the money).

Jones claimed he was able to point out the "block of flats" rear wings run by Benetton (BMW), Williams (Honda), Arrows (BMW) and Ferrari, yet the slowest of them, the Ferrari F1/86 of Michele Alboreto, was still around 20 km/h (12 mph) faster in a straight line than the Lolas which were running the bare minimum wing settings for speed on the straights while still having some grip in the turns.

With the lack of straight line speed and only minimal downforce, the closest time either driver could post to Teo Fabi's pole winning BMW powered Benetton B186 was Tambay who was 3.73 seconds slower.

The demotivation Jones was feeling in 1986 actually came to a head when he deliberately spun out of the Portuguese Grand Prix on lap 11 on the corner where the Haas motorhome was located.

In Cosworth's opinion, Benetton was structurally better positioned than Haas, so efficient further development of the turbo engine was possible.

After numerous technical failures at the beginning of the season, most of the drivers reached the finish line in the second half of the year.