Bragging rights.... 0-60

[Milkyway]

I know that 0-60 times are pretty academic, but we used to love reeling these off out of the various magazines.
Memories of a family friend & his ‘Dolly’ Sprint... he was a maniac.
If I used my later MG Maestro EFI for comparison, some of these must have felt pretty quick in their day.

Edited by Milkyway on Wednesday 2nd February 18:38

[Carbon Sasquatch]

Takes me back a few years

Laughable now - but there are a few shockers in the list - like a 1.6l Cortina being quicker than the 1.6l Capri.

[DonkeyApple]

I've never driven a Dolomite Sprint. Never sat in one. Never known anyone who had one. And I'm a little young for them to have been remotely common to see however there were always some random bits of information I knew about them: A weirdly table topping 0-60, a 16v engine?, alloy wheels and single post head rests.

My guess as to why I learned anything about them is that it was possibly due to them having twin headlamps which was the true mark of performance back then?

Very pretty saloons and it's always nice to see them in specialist classic car documentaries like Minder and The Sweeney.

[jeremyc]

DonkeyApple said:

... there were always some random bits of information I knew about them: A weirdly table topping 0-60, a 16v engine?, alloy wheels and single post head rests.

16 valves driven from a single camshaft, which is/was particularly random.

[Spydaman]

I had a couple back in the day. May mates had an Avenger Tiger, RS2000, Spitfire, Fiat 500, Vitesse etc. The Dolomite was most refined.

[geeman237]

I stumbled on this channel a while back. A classic car hire company posted some amusing 0-60mph tests of our favourite classics in a knock out competition. No Dolly Sprint though.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGryeMTGR3n3zxidX...

[sixor8]

I see the Fiat Mirafiori Sport is up there. A friend of mine had a 1977 one in the mid 1980s. It felt very quick, at the time. He wrote it off hitting a telegraph pole on a bend, with 4 of us in it.... Only cuts and bruises thankfully.

I did obsess slightly about 0-60 times in the used car price guides in the mid 1990s when I bought an Astra 1.8 SRi. It was faster 0-60 than an XR3i but, no, so many thought and still think the Ford is better....

[aeropilot]

Milkyway said:

I know that 0-60 times are pretty academic, but we used to love reeling these off out of the various magazines.
Memories of a family friend & his ‘Dolly’ Sprint... he was a maniac.
If I used my later MG Maestro EFI for comparison, some of these must have felt pretty quick in their day.

9.9 secs for a RS2000........4 up towing a caravan perhaps

I can find one period road test of a Mk.2 RS2000 that was more than 9.0sec to 60, and that was a late one, after they stopped making the RS1800 & RS Mexico, and it was a 'glacial' 9.2 secs.
Every other period road test and the 0-60 is either 8.5 or 8.6 secs.
One of those was a multi car test that included a Dolly Sprint, and the Sprint was a mere 0.1 secs quicker than the RS.

Sprint had a higher top speed though by a good 5+mph. It did have nearly 20hp more than a Mk.2 RS.....but they were very different cars.
One of my cousin had a Sprint, and I've had 3 x RS2's.
My cousin sold his Sprint (which he bought new) and replaced it with a Volvo 244 such was his hatred of the Sprint, because it spent so much time in the BL dealership being fixed (or trying to be fixed)

[Mr Tidy]

aeropilot said:

9.9 secs for a RS2000........4 up towing a caravan perhaps

I can find one period road test of a Mk.2 RS2000 that was more than 9.0sec to 60, and that was a late one, after they stopped making the RS1800 & RS Mexico, and it was a 'glacial' 9.2 secs.
Every other period road test and the 0-60 is either 8.5 or 8.6 secs.
One of those was a multi car test that included a Dolly Sprint, and the Sprint was a mere 0.1 secs quicker than the RS.

As a former MK2 RS2000 I was thinking exactly the same thing!

And why didn't they include a 3 litre Capri or V8 Rover in that list?

[moffspeed]

No messing, the Dolly Sprint was genuinely quicker than virtually all of its competition in its day. That’s if it wasn’t sitting in the garage having a problem fixed under warranty.

This is the “edgy” BL advert that I remember :



Incidentally a buddy of mine had a Sprint and it was definitely quicker than my standard Mk2 RS 2000, most contemporary road tests confirmed this I think. I upgraded to an X pack RS2000 with a David Sutton engine on twin 44s, the balance of power then swung back in Ford’s favour …

Edited by moffspeed on Wednesday 2nd February 22:56

[Dapster]

Carbon Sasquatch said:

Laughable now - but there are a few shockers in the list - like a 1.6l Cortina being quicker than the 1.6l Capri.

Big respect to the Lancia Gamma shredding just about everything else, and the Corniche outdragging the X1/9 - that would have been fun to watch. My dad had a Mercedes 200 at around that time, about 25 bhp down on the 250 that's in last place. It had 109 bhp to haul around about 8 tons of the finest German steel!

[Mark A S]

Drove both back in the Day, the Sprint and Standard RS2's along with modded versions. The Sprint was a little faster in a straight line than a standard RS, throw in some bendy bits though and it soon fell behind.

I think slumberland "tuned" the suspension

As mentioned above, it was the most civilised, but to us Youff's back then, that just said old mans car

[aeropilot]

Mark A S said:

Drove both back in the Day, the Sprint and Standard RS2's along with modded versions. The Sprint was a little faster in a straight line than a standard RS, throw in some bendy bits though and it soon fell behind.

I think slumberland "tuned" the suspension

As mentioned above, it was the most civilised, but to us Youff's back then, that just said old mans car

Slumberland tuned suspension

I had a few goes behind the wheel of my cousins one, just before he part ex-d it for the Volvo, and I can't remember it being that bad, but that's probably because you couldn't see how bad the suspension was because of the terrible seats.......standard Dolly seats with zero side bolstering or support, meant you couldn't begin to chuck the thing around as you flew around the cabin instead......plus you had the feeling you were sitting on a Sprint rather than in it......

They were a relaxed drive on the motorway though because of the overdrive.........(only plus point I can think off really)

Another case of a so-close-and-yet-so-far BL product.

[Magnum 475]

I can never quite understand why BL didn't use the Sprint engine for the TR7. I know they built a few (<10) TR7s with sprint engines, but as they had the engine available, why did they choose to stick the lower powered 8V engine in?

[a8hex]

Magnum 475 said:

I can never quite understand why BL didn't use the Sprint engine for the TR7. I know they built a few (<10) TR7s with sprint engines, but as they had the engine available, why did they choose to stick the lower powered 8V engine in?

Probably because they couldn't build the Sprint engines properly. It was supposed to be a 150BHP engine, the test ones were but the production ones weren't ever going to get close to that and they still had tons of reliability issues. I suspect the cheaper to make detuned version was expected to cost them less in the long run.
By all accounts is was easy to get a lot more power out the Sprint engine.

[2xChevrons]

Magnum 475 said:

I can never quite understand why BL didn't use the Sprint engine for the TR7. I know they built a few (<10) TR7s with sprint engines, but as they had the engine available, why did they choose to stick the lower powered 8V engine in?

The TR7 was always planned to be a comprehensive range of sports cars on a common platform - the turret top TR7 with the 2.0-litre slant four and the Sprint engine, the 3.5-litre TR8 in FHC and convertible form, the V8 long-wheelbase Lynx 2+2 to replace the Stag and an O-Series-powered MG version in convertible and breadvan GT form to replace the MGB.

But BL's ongoing financial problems, the closure of Speke in the face of unsolvable labour relations problems, changing exchange rates undermining the economics of selling sports cars in America and Michael Edwardes' drive to get BL out of all its niche markets meant that none of that really happened - we only got what was always intended as the 'base model' TR7, the convertible intended as an MG ended up being part of the TR7 range, the TR8 was never built in the numbers intended, the Sprint existed only for rally homologation purposes, the Lynx was canned just before pre-production began and the MGs never existed beyond the prototype stage.

There is also evidence that the Sprint engine was unlikely to reach production because by the time the Rover V8 had been tuned and modified for the US emissions requirements the difference in performance between the Sprint and the TR8 was negligible. The Sprint engine didn't stand a chance of being homologated for the US market, and was a phenomenally expensive and difficult engine for BL to produce.

Edited by 2xChevrons on Thursday 3rd February 10:39

[Milkyway]

Dolomite Sprint Review from Australia.... Worth a watch.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=aubBuChzGPw

Dolomite v Tesla

Edited by Milkyway on Thursday 3rd February 11:42

[ingenieur]

jeremyc said:

DonkeyApple said:

... there were always some random bits of information I knew about them: A weirdly table topping 0-60, a 16v engine?, alloy wheels and single post head rests.

16 valves driven from a single camshaft, which is/was particularly random.

Not that rare given every single MK1 BMW MINI had a single cam 16v head. (not the diesels)

[Magnum 475]

a8hex said:

Magnum 475 said:

I can never quite understand why BL didn't use the Sprint engine for the TR7. I know they built a few (<10) TR7s with sprint engines, but as they had the engine available, why did they choose to stick the lower powered 8V engine in?

Probably because they couldn't build the Sprint engines properly. It was supposed to be a 150BHP engine, the test ones were but the production ones weren't ever going to get close to that and they still had tons of reliability issues. I suspect the cheaper to make detuned version was expected to cost them less in the long run.
By all accounts is was easy to get a lot more power out the Sprint engine.

I modded a few Sprint engines in the 90s, in one case installed in a Spitfire(!), and you could certainly take it to >170 bhp without much difficulty. The biggest problem in the Dolomite engine bay was trying to do something to improve the exhaust. Installed in a Spitfire chassis there was plenty of room for a decent manifold - not so much with the Dolly though. I'm pretty sure the Dolomite exhaust manifold was one of the reasons why it didn't hit the 150bhp mark.

[V8covin]

aeropilot said:

9.9 secs for a RS2000........4 up towing a caravan perhaps

I can find one period road test of a Mk.2 RS2000 that was more than 9.0sec to 60, and that was a late one, after they stopped making the RS1800 & RS Mexico, and it was a 'glacial' 9.2 secs.
Every other period road test and the 0-60 is either 8.5 or 8.6 secs.
One of those was a multi car test that included a Dolly Sprint, and the Sprint was a mere 0.1 secs quicker than the RS.

Sprint had a higher top speed though by a good 5+mph. It did have nearly 20hp more than a Mk.2 RS.....but they were very different cars.
One of my cousin had a Sprint, and I've had 3 x RS2's.
My cousin sold his Sprint (which he bought new) and replaced it with a Volvo 244 such was his hatred of the Sprint, because it spent so much time in the BL dealership being fixed (or trying to be fixed)

I think they're talking about the Mk1 RS 2000