The V8 Owners Forum -

Got home and found that PPC (Practical Performance Car) have finally found where I now live and delivered a magazine

Real RV8 lovers should now avert their eyes (obviously not you Gav )

In this month's issue letters page Marcus (HairbearTE) took Will Holman to task and wrote a concise and highly authoritative rejoinder to Mr. Holman's cruel omission of the RV8 in the Top Ten Engines list.

However Mr. Holman has compounded his error by adding salt to the RV8's wounds by commenting, and I quote

"We wouldn't have considered it for the Top 100. Buick ditched it in the 60's because it wasn't very good and it remained not very good for the rest of its life. It's unreliable, badly made, leaks oil, makes poor power and costs a fortune to tune."

Mr. Holman then goes on to compare the Rover to a boat anchor.

Over to you guys!

SBC must be crap then, some made 120bhp with 50% more capacity than the Rover and 200lbs more weight Is PPC still carying ads for tuned 2litre Fords costing £7k? etc etc

Well he's talking out of his arse because to my knowledge the only reason the yanks dropped it is because they discovered they could make light weight iron engines with thinner cylinder walls etc....which was cheaper.

Badly made? They run forever even when neglected.

As for his comment about buick dropped the engine for a reason, well TVR, Morgan, Marcos..... all adopted it for a reason. That its a good engine!! God, if its good enough for TVR!!

And it a million times better than the ford V6. They are badly made, and are a total heap of shite.

Is a bit lacking in power I suppose, but we know that. But alround it takes some beating. I.e, power, weight, compactness, cost.....

I have never been so offended.

ohhh, and also, as I have just read on the net, they dropped aluminium engines partly due to thin wall casting techniques but also under pressure from the American steel industry.

Rover?









Pah!









LS1 BABY YEAH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!



Over and out.

go sit in the corner Gav!!!

Sod PPC what do they know. I only bought that magazine once as it had an article on alternative V8s (Lexus, Audi etc), think it was the only bit i read lol!

how did i guess you was gona have your 10p worth gav,

I've just found a place that makes conversion kits to put ls1's in 944's!! I'm all giddy with excitement!!!!

>cuddles his L98 TPI 350<

I think the RV8 is a great unit (as it's success has proven) and no doubt has its place - but I do wonder these days when I flick through any mags and see 250BHP/300ft.lb crate engines for 1400 quid already landed. Even so, that' still relatively expensive but if you can justify the inital outlay....

LS1 in a 944, if your talking renegade you may want to check us out at porsche hybrids before parting with your money. It's a forum where the ONLY porsches allowed are V8 powered.(well there's a turbo v6 buick but we like him) http://www.porschehybrids.com/
And lets face it, although the rovers were not 'dropped' in the 60's by buick, they actually went on to produce the engines for one of the best lux SUV's in N.America, the rangie. They also powered many many engines that needed the lightness and torque of the engine.
However lets face it, Rover rested on it's laurels, they had an eccentriclly mounted flywheel for a reason. They had many more tuning options they decided not to explore, instead they kept with the bonehead ideas of the 70's and never moved with the times, possibly because of the 90 degree offset, limiting the development of the heads, condeming it to it's original design. It's old, but so is the LS1. Wouldn't shout about having one of them too loundly, you may find some people yawning.
I have no idea what I would choose next time.
Rovers were a great engine for people on a shestring budget as they allowed the retention of many original parts, that was there strength, they allowed easy tuning and were cheap to do so. Then people thought they should invest thousands on the engine and make it something it wasn't. Fitting Chebby pistons and crank to Rover to make it a 350?? WTF.
I still find it ironic they the biggest class in the rover challange in the late 80's was the 9.90 and they kept breaking out. The hardest part was keeping the cars slow enough,3.5 engines, hand made inlets, reversed P6 manifolds, stock cranks and rods, some had JE or omegas. Most run a MSD and a bang of 100 Nitrous (most on pretty much stock engines), welded diffs and crap tires. Nearly 20 years on and we have forged pistons, extreeme heads and huge capacity engines, injection systems, stand alone ignition, variable nitrous, exotic heads, and has anyone broke through the 10's recientlty.
Just my 2 cents

Lewis wrote:>cuddles his L98 TPI 350<

I think the RV8 is a great unit (as it's success has proven) and no doubt has its place - but I do wonder these days when I flick through any mags and see 250BHP/300ft.lb crate engines for 1400 quid already landed. Even so, that' still relatively expensive but if you can justify the inital outlay....

Yes, dirt cheap, compared to buying or building a Rover V8 to get the same power output.

However, at the cheaper end of the scale the Rover is probably the easiest and cheapest way to get into the V8 market if the pennies are tight. The complete motor and tranny in my Morris came from a taxed and tested SD1 Van de Plas I bought off Ebay for the princely sum of £310 and drove home the 60 miles from Coventry.

If I decided I now wanted 250hp I would probably have to throw £1500 at it, and I doubt it would last the 100,000 miles you'd get from a SBC of the same output.

I've also seen evidence that hints/proves the Buick design originated in Germany, where the V8 was designed to be an airplane engine.