History
of the Rover V8
In 1984, 21 years after Rover Managing Director William
Martin-Hurst first met the all-aluminium Buick 215, Graham Robson shared the history
of the first twenty years of Rover V8 development in a fascinating article:Rover
and the light-alloy V8 engine met each other, quite by accident, in 1963, and
it was all a great coincidence. In the beginning, Managing Director William Martin-Hurst
was trying to sell Rover gas turbine engines to Mercury Marine in Wisconsin; then
the discussion turned to the idea of supplying 2¼-litre diesel engines
for fishing boats. Martin-Hurst
once told me:
I was in
Carl’s experimental workshops in Fond du Lac, talking about this and that,
when I saw that lovely little alloy vee-8 engine sitting on the floor. I said,
“Carl, what on earth is that?” He told me it was for a racing boat and
that he’d originally winched it out of a Buick Skylark car. I asked him whether
it would be available and I was astounded when he told me that General Motors
had just taken it out of production!
The
rest, as they say, is history – but it took four years of sometimes frustrating
negotiation, and re-development, before Rover eventually began building V8 engines
at Acocks Green. The very first machine to use the Rover- built V8 was the 3½-litre
(P5B) saloon, launched in the autumn of 1967, the first 4x 4 was the sensational
Range Rover of 1970 – and the V8 is now more important to Land Rover Ltd.
than it has ever been before. In a production life of 17 years, it has already
found use in machines as different as the forward-control 101in. military Land
Rover, and the race-winning Rover Vitesse hatchback, the Morgan sports car, the
MGBGTV8 and the Land Rover One Ten. |
