Surely a RV8 would easily first lengthways, but I guess you may have problems with the master cylinder clearance and then exhaust routing round the rack. Would be an awesome conversion though!

It's been done to a 240 before as I remember seeing it on ebay. I thought long and hard about buying it too, but talked myself out of it due to money constraints at the time.

I thought the Windsor was a 90 degree V too? And the Rover engine will still weigh less and is immensly tunable. Even the standard carb'd version like I have in the SD1 would turn a 360 into a bit of a beast. If I had the money it's a conversion I'd definately try!

foggyjames wrote:

A M R wrote:rover v8?

We said better The yanks rejected the Rover V8 in the 50s...that should tell you something

Pah, no 360 parts for you matey!!

The Rover v8 is a legendary engine, and always will be. GM lost out big time when they sold the whole project to Rover!

Get out

cheers

James

Admit it though, you can't help but love this noise:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkHT_spF5lY

(apologies for the rubbish video!)

Ah, so you're playing the "it's a V8 doooood" card, eh? Time to bring out the big guns...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OR_uE3X3Yes
Brummies: Check
Crap car: Check

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYdcIuB2vz8
Brummies: No
Lighting the rears on the dyno: hell yes


cheers

James

Yeah I'm playing that, because it's a damn good card to play

Wow, a Corvette on a dyno. Amazing(!) Now add up what the Corvette cost, and what that SD1 cost, not to mention having double (?) the capacity and an extra 25 years of technology!

Now take the Brummies out of the SD1, and put some proper drivers in:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qp1JJYtigEk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_-ZCQ7WA0s

And a couple more of my fav RV8 applications:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7r9TmZ1yWM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcKK8oyE40k
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmbmafKYcXY
And there's a v8 mini somewhere, but I cant find the vids of it.

Legendary

Haha.. Bashing Volvo in that vid qutie a lot and forgeting to mention that eventually 240 GrpA won the ETC title in -85.. Not too bad when you note the fact that in -83 Volvos (Chassis TL001) were raced only by private persons and it was -84 when Volvo started to engineer those cars..

And what comes to rumours that Volvo wasn't homologated.. everyone seems to be forgetting B21ETL which WAS available if you had the cash, GrpA parts are around from time to time, not all of those come from factory race cars.. For example this Finnish roadsport 240 has few nice original GrpA parts on it.. http://www.volvolandia.com/volvomekka/p ... ojekti.htm http://kuvablogi.com/blog/5626/

To me that kind of bashing what's on that vid and finding stupid excuses like little kids is just stupid, it's just as stupid as V8 guys wanting to ban the Skyline from GrpA at the early 90's because turbo Skylines won every single race they participated in the early 90's..

The car was built for the purpose of racing in the JTC Group A in Japan. It never lost a race - winning 27 races in a row from its debut, causing the series to be dissolved. The same essentially happened in the Australian Group A. It was the heaviest car in the series, yet it dominated through brute force paired with technology. The car was flat out banned from some endurance races in Australia.

"Boohoo we can't compete so we don't play with you anymore"

I didnt realise about the Volvo bashing until I watched all of it. That wasn't really the point of me posting that vid though - the SD1 and the v8 made a competitive race car!

Just been looking at the ETCC in a bit more details (well before my time) and there was some awesome cars participating. 1986 looking like the pic of the bunch - some great machinery out there then!

SD1 all the way!!

It does appear that there is a lot of truth in the allegation that Volvo didn't correctly homologate the 242 Turbos. I'm not entirely sure of the rules, but in principle there were supposed to be 500 cars which were as near as dammit a road-legal version of the racing cars...which the "homologation special" 242s - apparantly sold exclusively in the US - were not. Compare this with the Sierra RS500s, for example, and you'll see the difference in how far they went.

Essentially, the cars actually sold as the "homologation specials" were nothing more than totally standard 1983 242 turbos with the addition of a (standard sized) intercooler, boost controller and a different grille & bonnet...and allegedly a rear spoiler in the boot for the owner to fit if they wished.

Given that they got away with it, the most likely explanation is that correctly equipped cars were prepared for inspection, then the fancy parts were stripped and the cars sold near enough as standard. Little was made of the status of these cars, and undoubtedly many people drove them around unaware of the significance or rarity value.

Against the rules? Presumably not. In the spirit of things / a sportsman like attitude? Far from it, I suspect However, the important deed was done, and bitter Rover fans must forever live with the shame of their beloved cars being beaten by a pensioner special

Anyway, the most important thing to remember here is that the standard RV8 is a festering yankee-reject excuse for an engine, and Carl has been blinded by the nice (but not as nice as a real V8 ) sound.

Admit it, you'd be disappointed if we gave you anything other than abuse for it However, if you swap a TVR lump in there, I might just let you off A friend of a friend had a TR7 with a Griffith engine in it. He used to go through a set of rear tyres in two weeks. Oh yes.

cheers

James

I wouldnt expect anything other than abuse from you Mr Foggy

Jealousy is a bad thing

foggyjames wrote:(but not as nice as a real V8 )

So what is a real V8 then Foggy?

the gm v8 was made for a cheap crappy american car but the engine was too expensive and good for it so they sold it to rover who could surport it becouse rovers were expensive!

rover redesighed it to make it more like the sort of thing rover would have ...holley carb..thats not rover twin su's woo,

and so on

IT WASNT THAT IT WAS A CRAP ENGINE THAT THEY GOT RID OF IT!

come on you must know the history if not your just trying to have a go at rover or carl!


Cheers
will

Buick dropped it because it was too small to haul around the yankee barges, while it was just about perfect for smaller British cars. There were some cost issues when it came to production of the block (casting ally being fairly expensive), but I think the primary problem was that it wasn't really man enough The last time we were at the Pod, the only RV8 powered car there was making a sound you'd think would put it in the 12s...but getting beaten by 940 Turbos at 12psi....making perhaps 190bhp?

I've never been a fan of variable jet carbs, so I'm not sure why they'd swap out the Holley, short of it being 'tradition' to use SUs.

Bottom line as far as I'm concerned....unless it's going in a tiny kit-car...if you want an old-school V8, go the whole hog and get a small block Chevy. If you want something more efficient....Lexus and various others make some nice quad cam V8s which you can pick up for cheap these days.

Now don't get me wrong, pick up a worked version, or one of the larger displacement varients (4.6, TVR 5.0, etc), and it starts to get more interesting, but the standard 3.5 seems massively overrated to me...kinda like the B200E

cheers

James

190bhp is the standard EFI version from the early/mid eighties - not exactly the most advanced engine, but perfetly adequate for the time.

If you believe what you read, the reason that GM sold the engine is because of pressure from the Amercian steel industry - which at the time were a huge political power. Whether this is true or not I dont know, but it gave Rover one of the most legendary v8 engines ever made!

Mine doesn't have SUs, but Stromebergs (not that that's any better), giving a fairly lazy 155bhp, but on the plus side around 200 lb ft of toqrue. Thats enough to push the 1.4tonne SD1 to 60 in under 9s, but also gives a very nice drive. For example on the motorway at 70 you're doing 2.5krpm, which also happens to be where your peak torque is - much better than a revvy 155bhp 4 pot!

The good thing, for me at least, is that's it's easy to release lots and lots more power. You could go the obvious route of installing a later EFi engine, be it 3.5, 3.9 or 4.6 - all are fairly common. Or I could go for a cam swap and a 4 barrel Edelbrock - to get the engine revving to around 6.5krpm and therefore giving much more power.

The Buick version was also rated at 155 bhp with a 2 barrel carb, and 185 with a 4 barrel - so comparable to the twin carbs (Strombergs or SUs) and the more advanced EFI version.

So it's a lightweight (aluminium), compact engine, which is standard tune is extremely understessed, meaning that it's reliable, but also very tunable.

In my case it's also bolted into one of the best looking 'average' cars ever made. I love it, and along with many other of my oddball car choices I couldnt give a toss what anyone else thinks