Thread: The Legendary Rover V8

Originally Posted by jimbo110

Sure was, from wiki:
Fireball V6

The first engine in this family was introduced in 1961 with Buick's 198 cu in (3.2 L) engine, the first V6 in an American car.

There was a 5.6 litre V6 in GMC trucks in the 50's-60's. They also made a 11.3 litre V12 in this design buy using four of the V6 cylinder heads on a common block and crankshaft. An engine of most impressive appearance, the V12, sheer size, lots of heads and exhaust pipes. One can imagine the fuel consumption pulling a single drive prime mover and laden trailer. Gasoline was only about 20cents/gallon then.

Originally Posted by Brian Hjelm

Rover's passenger car market was the English upper middle classes, farmers, company cars for sales and factory managers, the upwardly mobile and nouveau riche looking for something with more snob appeal than Vauxhalls and Ford Zodiacs, etc. Larger engines were not uncommon in the cars catering to this market. Top end Austins of the 1950's had 4 litre in-line sixes, Jaguar the 4.2 litre, Daimler had a 4.5 litre V8 in the Majestic, Rolls Royce/Bentley had 4 and bit litre six cylinders before the 6.2 litre V8.
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The cars you quote were not in the same market as Rover's - except for Jaguar they were right at the top of the market and by the 1960s Austin were no longer producing cars with such large engines. And all of Rover's cars either in production or planned were smaller than the ones you mention.

Only in hindsight could you suggest that the engine should have been much larger, it is simply ignoring the realities of the 1960s to suggest otherwise. After all it was larger than almost all engines produced in Australia in the mid sixties, and Australia always had larger engines than the UK.

John

Originally Posted by JDNSW

The cars you quote were not in the same market as Rover's - except for Jaguar they were right at the top of the market and by the 1960s Austin were no longer producing cars with such large engines. And all of Rover's cars either in production or planned were smaller than the ones you mention.

Only in hindsight could you suggest that the engine should have been much larger, it is simply ignoring the realities of the 1960s to suggest otherwise. After all it was larger than almost all engines produced in Australia in the mid sixties, and Australia always had larger engines than the UK.

John

What about the 70's.....80's....90's.....

Originally Posted by rovercare

What about the 70's.....80's....90's.....

Good point - but Rover had set up 3.5l production by the late sixties, and almost immediately after that they were in the hands of the disaster called Leyland. No money was available to them until the late seventies, and then it was in short supply - Landrover was treated as a cash cow by Leyland, since it was the only part of the business making money. And by the eighties at least it was clear that the market for four wheel drives was primarily diesels, and a good, more powerful, diesel was obviously more important, although it took until the end of the eighties to produce it. And this necessarily had to be a small, highly boosted engine to meet European tax rules.

The constraints on finance for Landrover in the eighties had a lot of ill effects, but lack of a bigger petrol engine was minor compared to some of the others - for example, the fact that they could not afford to increase body width. An increase in body width of the coil sprung Landrovers along with the increase in track would have made a world of difference, but the cost of tooling (particularly for the bulkhead) was considered excessive.

John

I understand that somewhere in the development of the 4l+ motors LR outsourced the development to JE Engineering who had been privately developing the motor and supplying to race car builders
There is probably something more on Welcome to the JE Engineering Website

Tell you what though ... they build some pretty powerfull Rover V8s