Call me old-fashioned but.. mmmmm

love the idea of a V8 but as old crap goes that's one butt ugly mother of a car!

That's an SD1, a classic design. Not necessarily pretty, natch, but the v8 makes up for that. I do prefer the looks of the P6 but my taste is vastly suspect.

In news: snipped-for-privacy@pipex.net, Vamp decided to enlighten our sheltered souls with a rant as follows

For the owner of a Japanese X/19 copy to slag off a Rover SD1, one of the best looking cars ever built is beyond cheek.

Bet you just *love* TSW Venoms.

"Vamp" wrote

Not the best colour I've seen one in admittedly but they were a pioneering design in their day and thought to be very good-looking cars!

I'd have one in dark metallic blue.

yeah, there's still pretty nice looking a classic sort of way.. I've often thought that some car designs from the past would be great to evolve into modern designs. That would be one, as would the Mk3 Cortina - ie: if you smoothed off a few lines, adjusted some of the proportions here and there and brought all the trimmings & interior bang up to date, you'd have a bloody fit car :)

a welder I kinda knew years ago had a dark blue metallic one that he was doing up. I remember him showing me this engine he had in his dining room. It was a 3528 but he'd had it turbo or supercharged or something like that. The car was well nice though - the wheels are nice on those ;)

Bigus

Agreed - yuk.

id luv to have one of them too...but its mad how they managed to only get about 150hp out of a v8! they must have been trying hard not to make power.

id still have one tho

"Jon Reynolds" wrote

Ahh, no torque. The V8 had a load of torque and was so tunable (well it would be as it was hardly stressed at 150bhp...)

Its not available yet, but i'll be ordering as soon as Tower tell me its out ;) The other one will have to do for now, 3.5cc and 2.5bhp.

I think the higher CR engine was putting out 150 in the sixties, in the P6B for example. Might even have been 160.

The SD1 is a bizarre story w.r.t. the engines. The 2.3 and 2.6 engines were based on the excellent TR6 straight which could easily push out 160bp but the ad-gnomes realised this would make the v8 a slightly less than impressive engine, particularly when it was crippled by emission control gear in the US where it was making about 130 bhp (in the TR8, at any rate).

So rather than deleting the v8 or whacking a decent cam in it, they thought it would be a chortle to just castrate the straight six engines with a poor cam and restrictive valves and whatnot, so that they were dutifully gutless compared to the still gutless v8.

Worst of all, they even modified the straight six so that you couldn't just retrofit triumph parts and get the power back that way.

But it's not all bad, the v8 *is* quite happy to take more recent bits and pieces and there's no real trick to getting 200 bhp from it, e.g. decent carb and inlet, tubular exhaust manifolds, and something like a hurricane cam is getting into that sort of territory for a few hundred quid. And it has the grunt even in gutless tune, without being hugely overweight (the star quality of the v8 is it has an aluminium block in the days when that was a clever way to get the weight down.)

I like them. Though I think I prefer my 200hp *at the wheels* Subie. Bit cheaper to run as well.

Fraser

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the Triumph six should never have been put in the SD1. If they'd kept it just V8 they'd never have compromised the SD1's luxury status. Pandering to the kind of people who want "economy" is always going to bring grief.

The V8 is a fabulous engine, and the only good one that was ever fitted to the SD1.

They should have retro-engineered the SD1 so that 6 cylinder lump of s**te wouldn't fit.

I owned one, a 2600SE. Lovely car, let down by one of the worst engines I've ever had the misfortune to drive behind. The really annoying thing is, mine was a good one.

Hurricane cams are ok, but compromise driveability something ruthless in an SD1. You're better off with the late 3.9 cam.

"Pete M" wrote

Except me, I'd have a V8 SD1 in my dream fleet. They sound nice too. I'd have it instead of a stereo. In fact I'd have a multi car changer with all the best sounding cars on it :D

I bet the boot could fit quite a few subs ;)

Or 98bhp as standard in my mates cab-forward landy, it'll run on owt though from petrol to turps, supposedly ;)

In news:LQwFd.124911$ snipped-for-privacy@fe1.news.blueyonder.co.uk, Tony Bond (UncleFista) decided to enlighten our sheltered souls with a rant as follows

Yup!. I've just built a 200 bhp Landy.. That's fun

And didn't the designer of said car say he had taken inspiration for it from the Ferrari Daytona?

Hello,

Have you inspected it? I would like to see it before going on a picture.

Ditto here, AND i drive a jap x/19 :)