He plays fast and loose with the facts, such claiming "an F1 engine can get up to 2,600 degrees Communist," when the only thing that gets that hot is the flame front, and maybe (I'm guessing) the tip of the spark plug. That's well past the melting point of aluminum or steel.
It's just an air pump. All the mechanical falderal aside, the easiest was to make it rev higher is to makes it easier to fill and evacuate the cylinder. You couldn't in good faith address this topic (not comprehensively anyway) without mentioning the most (IMHO) fascinating attempt to make the world's highest-revving reciprocating engines.
Five overhead valves were too limiting to air exchange, and to be effective, six valves had to have pockets so large as to leave the cylinder dome weakened. Backin the 1980s, Honda decided that the cylindrical cylinder and piston were too limiting, so they created oval ones. With eight overhead valves per cylinder.
Behold, the Honda 0X engine:
So-called "bathtub" shaped pistons to allow for a more spaicous cylinder dome.
Two con rods per piston to limit rocking.
Honda was competing in a motorcycle racing class that didn't cut 4-stokes any slack for their low output, and it was limited to engines with four cylinders or fewer. So they made a 4-cyilinder 4-stroke engine with as many valves, con rods and spark plugs as an 8-cylinder engine, and that revved twice as high as the competition's 2-strokes.
It could rev to 23,000 but was limited to 19,000 for endurance events. Remind me again, what's the redline on today's F1 engines?????
And you'll notice that Honda didn't bother with slipper pistons. Or Desmodromic valves. Which sort of shoots holes in Driver61's theories.
The bike they put it in was called the NR500. The "NR" was said to stand for "Never Raced" because the bike was problem-plagued, however, none of the show-stoppers were directly related to the engine. Honda had in fact met the goal of a half-liter 4-stroke engine that made as much power as the competition's 500cc 2-strokes, "simply" by making it rev twice as fast (one of Soicihiro Honda's favorite axioms was, "RPMs are free").
So why were there no imitators? Because not only was the 0X engine a successful "proof of concept," it also cost about as much to build as the US space program. And it would have taken their competitors some time (and massive expense) to be able to compete with the bathtub-pistoned 0X, which means Honda might well have dominated every promotion they competed in until their opponents could catch up. So every racing venue on earth with reciprocating engines running on fossil fuels banned it before the NR500 was cold in its grave.
You can include F1 in that list. TR 5.2.7 reads, "All engines must have six cylinders arranged in a 90° “V” configuration and the normal section of each cylinder must be circular."
And the "circular cylinder" requirement was created back in the 1980s specifically for the benefit of Honda.