On May 6, 1:44pm, Dick Nyquist wrote:
> Subject: Re: Triumph 2000/Renown
> You always hear people refer to almost any older Britcar engine as having
> come out of a tractor. As far as I know the wet slieved triumph engine is
> the only one with a genuine tractor connection
Well, that makes it REALLY special then! :-)
On a related note, lots of people know that the original 4-banger that went
in to the AH 100 was first stuffed into Austin Taxis that were so common
after WWII. However, the engine was originally intended for use in jeeps
during the war.
Fascinating. And of course the Coventry Climax FWA (Feather Weight Alloy)
was originally designed as a fire pump engine for use during the blitz.
If you think about it, a fire pump and a racing motor have similar demands:
both need to be light (one so the fire fighters can lug it around quickly,
the other so that the race car can get lugged around quickly), be able to
run at full throttle as soon as they're started, and be somewhat position-
independent.
Then there's the BMC B Series engine. This one's pedigree goes back to
the early Thirties, when Austin was building a Chevrolet six-cylinder
engine, known affectionately as the Stovebolt, under license to be used
as a truck engine. After the war, Austin did some design changes and
ended up with what amounted to a four-cylinder version of this engine.
They moved the ports all to one side and the ignition to the other so
that gas leaks wouldn't land on the distributor. Then they realized
that to get four ports in and four ports out, with the pushrods on the
same side of the block as the ports, would require more room than they
had in the head. So they siamesed the intakes and the middle exhaust
port and ended up with the familiar five-holer we've seen in MGs since
the ZA Magnette. So we've got agricultural, commercial, and military
origins for the three biggest names in British sports cars. As I always
say, the difference between British sports cars and Italian sports cars
is that British sports cars work in spite of their specifications, while
Italian sports cars fail in spite of theirs.
I can only close with a couplet from "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers,"
a poem written by George Gordon, Lord Byron, as a 19th-century flame against
the magazine "The Edinburgh Review," which had just panned the book of
short verse that he had published:
Peasants, and boats, and waggons! O ye shades
Of Pope and Dryden, are we come to this?
--Scott "And so, for God's sake, hock and soda water" Fisher
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