Just wondered if anyone has heard of this one before? I hadn't!

The Volvo 343 XD-1 "experimental diesel" car, which broke the speed record for diesel cars (up to 2.0L) back in 1978:


http://www.cardatabase.net/search/photo ... size=large

Swedish rally champion Carl Magnus Skogh reached 209,18 km/h on the main runway at Gothenburg airport.

He had some trouble getting into it though, as the whole steel body was replaced with glass fibre to reduce weight and drag:


the rear spoiler was particularly subtle too:


Some figures:
VW 5 cyl engine (as used in Volvo 244 in Italy (and Finland too?))
Garrett Turbo
138 PS
Weight: 815 kilos

Cheers

Tom

yes i heard about is and it has its own chapter in the great volvo 300 series book from Lorenz Kunz

as you see, a MY77 was used as a base of the car

with the front and rear spoiler the drag was reduced from 0,43 to 0,32

the 1986cc 5cyl VW diesel engine with turbo was from a Audi 100 5D; also used in a special export version (to italy) of the volvo-limousine 244

it ran 22psi of boost from the garrett turbocharger, for the engine to handle this amount of boost, the CR had to be reduced from 23:1 to 17:1 , with this and various other mod's it made 138ps (or 102KW) at 5000rpm, in torque it did 240Nm at 3000 rpm

the tranny was a custom build manual 5speed by the british company Herstellers Hewland (remember, at this time all 300's rolled out of the factory with a B14.0 and CVT transmission!) the same transmission was used in formula one cars of that time.

this was also probably the first 300 to stand on 7J 15" rims with 195-50-15 tyres, though it had 175wide with 14" rims at the front

and for the real purists; the inside still had the brown dashboard with the pushbutton lightscontrol setup

40-60kmh 2,5 sec
40-80kmh 4,5 sec
40-100kmh 7,0 sec
40-120kmh 9,2 sec
40-140kmh 13,2 sec
40-160kmh 17,7 sec
40-180kmh 29 sec

more info can be found in:
W.K. auto motor und sport 12/1979
Stephan Würsten, Volvo-fan 01/1996

That is awesome!! Shame they never made a 5cyl turbo diesel production model

Cheeky - those look like ATS Cups on the front

It looks like a 1/1 sacle RC car.

yeah the data says 15" on rear and 14" on the front but the pics show it the other way

the 15" ers are indeed ATS cup rims
the 14" rims are ATS classic

I think that we had 244 diesel only for one or two years, then it was replaced by D6, telling it had 6 cylinder diesel engine. Not too common those 5 pot 244's, also those were thought to be not so good motos and most people try to avoid them.

I had heard about this record car, but had not heard such lot of details before, great stuff

Clean Mk1 343... ATS Cups and a bit of lowering... I see VW boy rivalry for a quarter of the price

volvodspec wrote:yes i heard about is and it has its own chapter in the great volvo 300 series book from Lorenz Kunz

I really need to get that book. But I'm still holding back because of the costs (about 50 Euros or so, with postage ...)

The XD-1 story shows how much effort Volvo put into the 343 in the beginning. First that speed record, then European Rallycross champion in 1980, pity they didn't really follow it on with a bit more motorsport effort!

Some more pics:

The push-button dash (do I spot two rev counters?):


The VW/Audi engine:


The spoiler:


Cheers

Tom

trabitom99 wrote:I really need to get that book. But I'm still holding back because of the costs (about 50 Euros or so, with postage ...)

the entire book is in german; i can very vagulay read it but i actually bought it for the pics; even then it was worth it imo