Rover SD1 Vitesse - American V8 Power Meets British Engineering | Tyrrell's Classic Workshop

great it's all there hello and welcome to another tyrolds classic workshop it's been a while but we're back there's been lots of questions about one car that's sort of been in the background of various other videos uh and it's this car here the humble rover sd1 vitesse and this is a very personal car for me because my dad had one of these they were terribly difficult to get hold of when they were new and launched in 1976 and started being available during 1977 78 and there was a waiting list for them and my dad had one and it was a great car but unfortunately everything else was very much against it it was a bit like a talented child being born into a dysfunctional family british leyland at the time was in a truly polished state in the mid to late 70s you had trade union leaders who were intransigent they couldn't see anything but their own agenda same with management there was so much infighting and politics going on that the car didn't really stand a chance and that's a tragedy and in fact it got so bad that eventually as we know rover and the british motor industry largely has either now ceased to exist or fallen into foreign hands and that's because they couldn't see beyond the end of their noses more often than not tragic but this car is possibly the best example of a very very good car being born into that jaguar made some fabulous cars during the 70s they were world beaters in their own way the styling is very blatantly based on the ferrari daytona which is hardly a bad thing in a way because the daytona is such a beautiful car but it's got these sort of wedge-shaped lights here around the corner wrap around which is almost exactly carbon copy daytona and it's also got this groove that runs along the sides also exactly like the daytona and this was based on a blood trough in a dagger would you believe that's what it's commonly known as without getting too technical when a dag is inserted it allows the flow of blood out of it gruesome but that's where it came from and piniferina used it as a styling feature on the daytona and also the 400 series 365 and rover robbed it for the v8 but this car is a really good car the history of the v8 engine is fascinating in its own way it's perhaps the most successful marriage of american cubic inches american power and european everything else really jensen did it with the interceptor gordon keeble did it um eso did it in italy de tomaso did it they all bought in american firepower for their cars but the engine like the best things in life it sort of happened by accident really william martin hirst who was the managing director of rover in 1962 took a trip over to wisconsin to general motors mercury marine engine division and he was there to talk about a deal for land rover in the uk to marinize to make suitable for boats their two-liter four-cylinder engine which had been with them for many years it was a wheezy old engine but it did the job and it was solid and reliable and he was walking around the mercury uh marine division and he saw a lovely little cute all-alloy v8 engines sat on a crate on the floor and he said to them what what's this and they said well it's hit the end of its production run we're not using it anymore because american cars in the 1950s the last thing they were concerned about was fuel consumption and you know all they wanted was to carry all that metal and chrome round with reasonable speed and reasonable ease and reasonable luxury forget the fuel consumption forget the damage on the environment none of that really mattered so this engine because it was only 215 cubic inches 3528 cc was too small for general motors to use they'd used it in the buick special they'd used it in an old oldsmobile and in 1963 it was surplus to requirements so what william martinhurst did was take some measurements and say i think that engine will slot straight in our saloon cars and the rest is history um it did slot in the p5 as it was then and from 1964 unusually rover did a deal with general motors they bought the whole project they bought the whole engine casting dies everything lock stock and eight smoking barrels from general motors and the engine slotted straight in the rover 3500 came out or the p6 3.5 and then the sd1 and the beauty of this engine is it is incredibly tunable the history of this car is it was launched in 76 and the production ceased in 86 so it had a 10-year production run with a facelift in 1982. it's very unusual in the fact that it had a tremendously successful competition career but at the end of its life not at the beginning so um they weren't used and jaguar were doing the touring cars with the broad speed xjc's the big cats as they were called one of which we got in the background here and um because of all the infighting and posturing the sd1 wasn't allowed to get a look in and they were selling all they wanted to so they had a waiting list for them fast forward to the late 80s and the sd1 is beginning to wane sort of interest wise for the public so they uh they started using it in competition tom walkenshaw people like that started converting them for track use and for rallying and they were phenomenally successful they won prizes year in year out during the in the mid to late 80s and the vitesse was sort of the basis of that it i used 190 brake horsepower version of the v8 engine with sequential fuel injection and lucas system very cobbled together very just about really and no more in a lot of ways sort of electrically and engineering-wise partly the technology of the time partly budget requirements and then to give them a final hurrah and to keep them competitive they brought out a different inlet system and for the top of the engine in the middle of the v and it was called the twin plenum which is a slight inaccuracy because it's actually twin throttles but they only made 500 of them which was the basic requirement for to homologate them to make them suitable to be used in a racing car so rover could say well there we are we're making them so we want to use them on the track and very few of them survive now the twin plane and vitesses some have been converted but there was a very high attrition rate due to rust accident damage just things falling apart because of the lovely build quality and this is a rare survivor it's come in it's not particularly our normal fare but it's a great car this engine i believe has actually had some reworking done inside it the the beauty of the twin plenum setup is that rovers stuck to the original 190 brake horsepower power figure but in reality they developed more um but rover didn't have to didn't redisclose that as a lot of car manufacturers did in the 60s because they didn't want to have to re-certify the engine emissions wise and all the rest of it so they kept it the same but in truth the twin plenum cars normally from the factory developed an extra 10 20 30 brake horsepower over standard this engine has been reworked it's actually really really responsive this engine it's got a sports exhaust on it and it's got a remapped injection system and probably i suspect from the way it's picking up on the throttle response possibly a light and flywheel and a sports camshaft but this car goes and it sounds great what we've done to the car is done some work on the injection system it had an intermittent running faults which we've sorted out we've replaced the two flexible intake pipes on the induction system we've given the car a good tidy up we've had the wooden dashboard inserts repaired and thanks to jed and the team at gdk veneering for that they've done a super job and we've just given the car a bit of a birthday and it's a lovely trip down memory lane to have this car here and to drive it it was described in period as a poor man's aston martin v8 i sort of get that strangely enough particularly with this engine the power to weight ratio because they're quite a light car actually for their size um is not too different to an aston martin v8 so this car assuming everything else is on par would crack 140 miles an hour doesn't sound all that fantastic now but in the 1980s that was quite respectable um so we're just going to take the car out for a run finish sorting the injection out and hopefully it's performing really well well here we are on the road this is a manual for tess they did actually sell them as automatics uh in fact i used to service one for a customer in the 1980s and it was a very good car with the automatic gearbox but the uh this gearbox was actually specially built for the rover sd1 originally it's called the 77 millimeter gearbox um and that was because the distance between the main shaft and the lay shaft in the first motion shaft was 77 millimeters between centers and that normally the bigger that dimension the more meter the gearbox generalizing very drastically but um it was a great box it's got a lovely gear change actually really slick uh because again the gearbox is uh the gear lever is almost on top of the gearbox it's not uh it's not a series of cables going to either the front or back of the car so it gives a really lovely precise gear change um well it's warm through now the temperature gauge is not working which is uh good old british leyland wiring from the 1980s it was working and i know the the temperature is fine so let's just uh let's just open it up and see what sort of power delivery we have yes very nice yeah not a lot wrong with that sounds great pulling like a train it's got loads of torque and there we go yeah one of the reasons for this car's major success in competition was the blend of different qualities of this car and when i said earlier it was like a talented child that had been sort of born into a dysfunctional family um the car has got talent because the body shell was structurally uh remarkably stiff for a car of its era which meant that when you put stiffer suspension on it and um put it on a racetrack or on a rally stage um the car actually was torsionally rigid which meant it handled really well considering the size of it and that engine that v8 engine is so tunable and this is fairly mildly tuned but it's still i reckon in the real world this is probably producing thick end of 230 240 brake horsepower and um it's more than enough to propel this car along with with real gusto just try it again oh yeah no shortage of performance there um what a great it just got bags of character this car that's the only way i can put it it's just got loads of character um it's not sterile um it's not a sort of just a a means of transport from a to b even in period it was built as an entertaining car it's very spacious very comfortable the seats are really comfy to sit in but it has got that lovely um tunable light i mean the this v8 engine has got so much going for it it's um it was relatively cheap to manufacture for an alloy blocked engine um it was small it was barely longer than the four-cylinder rover engine that they were desperate to update it's very tunable remarkably economical all things considered and it actually lasts quite a long time too it was an absolute win-win-win uh such a marriage made in heaven putting these engines in these cars and of course the range rover was originally um in 1970 intended to have a four-cylinder engine the the the rover unit and when they discovered this jam in the mid 1960s that was it the range rover had it from the word go one of the world's first if not the world's first luxury uh suv and part of that was the was the v8 engine um yeah so all good the thing about this car is it's so rippy the engine response on it it's like a bike engine you just touch it i'm just touching the throttle there one of the other surprises about this car is it's a five-door family saloon stroke hatchback this is partly because it was so successful in motorsport but you can really fling this car around it does just handle really well it turns in very crisply and it's off negligible body roll um you really can just uh throw it round fantastic fun [Applause] um well that concludes another tyrell's classic workshop video i hope you've enjoyed it um it is worth mentioning as well that um thanks to to all the people who tune into this we've just uh passed the 2 million mark in 10 months in terms of views which is fantastic so a huge thanks to everybody and we just tipped over the 60 000 subscribers as well don't forget it costs nothing to subscribe and costs nothing to share but it does help the channel and it does encourage us to keep making them so we'll be back soon you

Channel: Tyrrell's Classic Workshop

Views: 251,200

Rating: 4.9675541 out of 5

Keywords: Iain Tyrrell, Tyrrell's Classic Workshop, Classic Car Expert, Classic Car Restoration, Classic Car Insights, Classic Cars Cheshire, Rover SD1 Vitesse, V8, Buick 215, Oldsmobile

Id: JXJJoP4pFM0

Length: 16min 42sec (1002 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 27 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/MisterSquidInc]

My dad had one when I was a kid.

I was working for an Audi dealer when the A7 came out and was immediately reminded of the Rover SD1 which upset a few people!

[u/dyonisos911]

I just love that channel. Could listen to it for days.

[u/lawtechie]

Rovers (pre Honda) were some neat, capable sedans, but let down with typical British Leyland woes.

And those wheels are awesome. I had a set on my P6.

[u/Bamfor07]

The SD1, much like the XJS, is an example of truly great design being muddled by bad leadership.

[u/AKOWPOSIA]

Such an unexpected sound to come out of a Rover saloon car.

[u/TostitoSqueegee]

I really want to own one of these in the US.

[u/Clareth_GIF]

That blood trough inspired design feature is something I would have never expected. And it looks great too.

[u/daveb2457]

Awesome, awesome! I've always loved the SD1, I'm old enough to remember when they came out. I couldn't believe a RWD alloy V8 MT sedan was available in the US. That thing sounds remarkably like my SS!