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Please excuse the title, but it is a direct quote from Practical Peformance Car magazine this month, there have been a few comments and readers letters recently debating on the pros and cons of the rover v8, so they have gathered together 7 different rover v8 powered cars and rolling road tested them for comparison. This should get you all talking !!
The results are quite interesting, and confirm what I have seen a number of times in other magazines, and that is that Rover v8's never make the power people think they do. (or are told they do by tuners / sellers !)
In the test is a 10.5:1 S1 P6, apparently rover claimed 184 bhp (sounds a lot to me), on 5 star fuel, this one was making 123 bhp, however it had some fault which was probably limiting power, and you can see from the power plot that it might have made about 150 bhp if the fault wasn't there.
Amongst the others is twin plenum SD1, in imaculate condition having had £12k spent on it (the whole car not the engine alone), this one made 171bhp.
The rest included a 5.2 litre with ported heads etc... made 241bhp, and top of the lot was a 4.8litre running ported heads, special cam, and single plenum injection (yes just the one), and that made 261 bhp.
What is interesting, is that during the testing several of the cars have some sort of issue, either weak / rich mixture, power spark etc, and it shows that just getting the thing setup right can make the world of difference.
In next months mag they're going to be testing a bunch of cars with different V8 engines for comparison. Should be an interesting read ! ( I know they recently tested a tuned all-alloy chevy engined car that produced 650+ bhp)
The results are quite interesting, and confirm what I have seen a number of times in other magazines, and that is that Rover v8's never make the power people think they do. (or are told they do by tuners / sellers !)
In the test is a 10.5:1 S1 P6, apparently rover claimed 184 bhp (sounds a lot to me), on 5 star fuel, this one was making 123 bhp, however it had some fault which was probably limiting power, and you can see from the power plot that it might have made about 150 bhp if the fault wasn't there.
Amongst the others is twin plenum SD1, in imaculate condition having had £12k spent on it (the whole car not the engine alone), this one made 171bhp.
The rest included a 5.2 litre with ported heads etc... made 241bhp, and top of the lot was a 4.8litre running ported heads, special cam, and single plenum injection (yes just the one), and that made 261 bhp.
What is interesting, is that during the testing several of the cars have some sort of issue, either weak / rich mixture, power spark etc, and it shows that just getting the thing setup right can make the world of difference.
In next months mag they're going to be testing a bunch of cars with different V8 engines for comparison. Should be an interesting read ! ( I know they recently tested a tuned all-alloy chevy engined car that produced 650+ bhp)