The F1 engine is interesting from this PoV because the thing as it is documented does not work (and even the documented design is full of weird design decisions that nobody today knows the reason for) and it worked by combination of luck and institutional knowledge of the actual machinists who built it not exactly to specifications.

In fact if you take various “high tech” designs from middle of the 20th century you will see a pattern of things that cannot work if built as designed, but work because of random effects that are certainly outside of what the original designers thought of (I have seen large amount of instrumentation electronics where voltage sag on supply voltage is part of feedback loop and it will not work without it. I highly doubt that the original engineers consciously designed that.)