The Ultimate Rover V8 - Your opinions?

[MPoxon]

I bit of a light hearted topic but purely out of interest, money no object what would people consider the to be the ultimate Rover V8 engine for a TVR Griffith? The engine would be for fast road use so must be drivable around town and reliable ie no lumpy race engines with aggressive cam profiles.

I was thinking the Austec 5.2 litre engine or possibly one of the many offerings from V8 developments with a few ACT goodies straped on?

[pwd95]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNcvdPUvKdg&fea...

http://www.tvrmonster.co.uk/video/monsteratspalaps...

Was on Classifieds until recently. If I had the cash it would be in the garage now. ...

John Eales 5 litre I believe, with hydraulic lifters?

[Johno]

I'd go with a JE short stroke 5ltr lump. I'd want to keep with the original displacement, but dispose of the long stroke.

The difficulty is that without upgrading the cam at least a little, you're not going to get the kind of performance you'll want from an ultimate engine . . .

I'd to go for solid lifters, roller rockers, torque biased cam, mappable ECU, custom manifolds, JE swan neck 8 throttle bodies being fed cold air through modified intake routing, fully ported/polished/gas flowed to match, baffled sump, fully balanced and dressed in metallic black and silver.

[dnb]

I think I'd go for a John Eales short stroke 5 litre bottom end and some wildcat heads with a nice set of throttlebodies. Then make the cam as wild as possible given the low RPM drivability allows.

[spend]

Dry sump? Certainly better valve train - I'd still like roller cam, certainly solid lifters and roller rockers. For sure lightweight forged pistons, small carrillos and crank (not one of those big fat barstewards ). RPM's will give you power if not quite the torque ~ but its not such a big deal in a lightweight road car IMHO.

Don't really understand why everyone is suddenly so keen on JE crossover, better to keep the hot water separate from the intake manifolds IMHO.

By the time you spend doing everything you might as well just go to Wildcat and get a 6.0, at least its a proper package rather than loads of bitsa here bitsa there developments?

[hiltonig]

until now !!!!, a nice lazy engine one that I dont have to rev too much, so for me it would be 5.3, forged pistons ceramic coated ,steel crank,standard lifters,roller rockers,h beam con rods, ringed heads with ceramic coated combustion chambers standard 500 valves,lower compression,cam suitable for forced induction and the sc kit on top, all controlled on a Motec m800


The full wildcat jobbie with their heads might be a handfull around town !!!

Edited by hiltonig on Tuesday 16th February 08:28

[450Nick]

Ultimate? Well if we're dreaming here we might as well dream big... I'd go for a Wildcat 6.xL with maybe a twin Rotrex charged induction. That'd have to push you up around 7-800bhp easy?? I know Carl Hansen's Tuscan with a 6.xL engine puts out something like 650bhp on a Motec EFI so slap a couple of chargers on there running twin plenums and you'd have a real monster. Much more fun than yet another LS conversion... One day when I have some spare time and money I might try and build such a monter in my Chim. That'd be a laugh

[JazzyO]

I'm having the Austec 5.2 put in my car, we'll find out what it's like in a couple of month's time when the resto is done.

The 5.3 that was in my car was an awesome thing until it blew up of course.

Personally, I could not for the life of me imagine wanting more than 400bhp in a Griff. And 330 - 350 is enough for me.


Onno

[hiltonig]

What was the cause of the 5.3 to blow up ?????

[450Nick]

JazzyO said:

I'm having the Austec 5.2 put in my car, we'll find out what it's like in a couple of month's time when the resto is done.

The 5.3 that was in my car was an awesome thing until it blew up of course.

Personally, I could not for the life of me imagine wanting more than 400bhp in a Griff. And 330 - 350 is enough for me.


Onno

I dunno, I've got a smidge over 400 in my Chim and got used to it pretty quick... I'd happily have another 100bhp. I'm sure I'd only get used to that too though. With a nice hot set of R888's on the car around a warm track on a really nice setup it barely spins the wheels up at all (without big provocation) so there's still plenty of grip to abuse. Of course the rest of the car would need beefing up then so it starts to get expensive. That said, in this cold & wet weather I don't think I've been able to use much more than 1/3 throttle for weeks so the last thing it needs on the road is more power. My road tyres are rather bald at present though

I suppose it depends where you're going to use it. On the road there's only so much power you can put down with pot holes, drain covers etc, plus there just isn't the room to use it without having to hammer on the breaks every few seconds so there's little point unless you happen to live in North Wales...

[griffdude]

NA Wildcat 6.0, 8 throttle bodies, an exhaust by CliveF

[RichardD]

450Nick said:

...
I dunno, I've got a smidge over 400 in my Chim and got used to it pretty quick... I'd happily have another 100bhp. I'm sure I'd only get used to that too though. With a nice hot set of R888's on the car around a warm track on a really nice setup it barely spins the wheels up at all (without big provocation) so there's still plenty of grip to abuse. Of course the rest of the car would need beefing up then so it starts to get expensive. That said, in this cold & wet weather I don't think I've been able to use much more than 1/3 throttle for weeks so the last thing it needs on the road is more power. My road tyres are rather bald at present though

I suppose it depends where you're going to use it. On the road there's only so much power you can put down with pot holes, drain covers etc, plus there just isn't the room to use it without having to hammer on the breaks every few seconds so there's little point unless you happen to live in North Wales...

I like information like this and your stance on this topic. Generally there is only so much power required (would reckon 150bhp is plenty for most of the time!?), but sometimes it is a case of the more the better

Can I ask though if you had another 20% more bhp how would you want it? Would it be 20% more grunt in each gear or would you prefer to hold gears longer, so say 120mph in 3rd vs 100mph (a made up example) ? Or somewhere inbetween?

[450Nick]

Hi Richard!

I would probably go for a combination of both to be honest. The reason I want more power at the end of the day is that I love that shove in the back when I put my foot down. That's the bit that really induces the grin above anything else. For track driving and thinking about what I'd actually do with that power, I would like that power spread over the whole range as I've noticed around some tracks that there just isn't a gear for a given situation and I would love to be able to hold on to gears for that little bit longer, even if it didn't give me any more power.

An example of this for me is coming into the Gooseneck at Cadwell Park. The long right hander before it has me use up all of 3rd no problem, so I change up to 4th. Very quickly after that though comes the setup for the right-left gooseneck, which seems require the car to be loaded nicely on the nearside front corner to get a nice turn in. This is quite hard to do whilst simultaneously changing down to 3rd (required as the revs drop off too much in 4th to really make the most of the corner). So I end up finding that the car feels much better settled and happier coming into the corner in 3rd so that I can simply brake and turn in without the complication of grabbing 3rd at the same time (even with a nice downshift), powering out in 3rd. So I end up finding that the smoothest way to do it is to just hang on to 3rd close to the limiter for an extra couple of seconds (not too close to the limiter, mind!) which results in time lost in the corner. It's bloody annoying, but it's only been trackdays so I don't mind so much. In the end I just stick it in 4th and take the corner in 4th most of the time to be nice to my engine, but it bugs me that I'm not doing it as fast as I could. So really another 1k revs would be lovely in such situations, I guess it just gives you a bit more flexibility.

I'm sure track drivers would tell me to man up and learn to downshift quicker and slicker (I'm working on that), but I'd love to try it with perhaps a 7.5k rev limit, all else being equal as I love that corner

Anyway, this is off topic now! Sorry all, as you were

[Bluebottle]

I'm with Nick here, in the real world you need a nice fat power band, not a steep curve to a narrow power band. Because you can't put enough gears in a gearbox to stay in the power band all of the time so you end up comprimising your entry or exit speeds in some corners as Nick demonstrated above...losing a small amount of that max bhp by fattening up the power band is a comprimise that you need to make if you want to be quick around a circuit.
Top end race cars get around this issue by changing the gear ratios for each track.

E.T.A...6.xL Wildcat with twin blowers I like your thinking there Nick

Edited by Bluebottle on Tuesday 16th February 12:53

[rev-erend]

Mine

[topsparks]

Been there done that!,370bhp,425 lbft.Robs 5.5,500 heads mechanical 404,group A rockers tripple plenum.

[spend]

What about a TT squareish8 made from siamesed 2 litre Rovers - probably much cheaper than making a flat plane crank

Can we get silly now? please

[spend]

...because a seasoned block has been through all the heat & stress cycles - it isn't going to warp etc. any more.

However you cast it, whoever casts it.. you can never be sure the sand stayed where it should, the metal flowed as one, no air bubbles.....

[300bhp/ton]

MPoxon said:

I bit of a light hearted topic but purely out of interest, money no object what would people consider the to be the ultimate Rover V8 engine for a TVR Griffith? The engine would be for fast road use so must be drivable around town and reliable ie no lumpy race engines with aggressive cam profiles.

I was thinking the Austec 5.2 litre engine or possibly one of the many offerings from V8 developments with a few ACT goodies straped on?

Surely it has to be a Chevy LS if it's money no object??? As much as I love the RV8 (which is a lot), its an old old engine and well outclassed these days.

[Boosted LS1]

4.6-4.8l crossbolted block, custom forged pistons, low compression and a pair of GT 28's should see something like 5-600 hp without being to stressed. Use stock revs and tvr heads etc.