Rover may have considered it a big engine for big cars, but Morgan saw its potential as a powerplant for a sports car. It widened its traditional body and chassis to accommodate the Rover V8 to make the Plus 8, which was launched in 1968 as the fastest accelerating car produced in Britain. Perhaps inspired by Morgan’ s concept, BL decided to install the engine in its own sports car, the MGB. The MGB GT V8 was produced from 1973 to 1976. A year later, the V8 was put into Triumph’ s wedge-shaped sports car to create the TR8, but this was purely for the USA and Canadian market. In the Nineties, MG had another go with the V8 and made the RV8, a modernised MGB roadster with a 3.9-litre version of the V8.
The sports cars that really made Rover’ s V8 shine, though, originated from Blackpool. TVR, while nothing to do with BL, got hold of Rover’ s eight-cylinder and put it in one of its Wedge-era cars in the early Eighties. The 350i with a standard 3.5-litre capacity kicked things off, before larger versions of the engine were developed. The biggest and most powerful is a 5-litre version in the Griffith 500. This version used 94mm bores and a 90mm stroke, and had around 290hp and 434Nm of torque according to specialists.
This is by no means an exhaustive list of all the TVRs equipped with the Rover V8, let alone all the cars. It’ s not even all of the low-volume British manufacturers that used it because Marcos, Ginetta and Westfield – yes, Westfield, the makers of tiny Lotus Seven-derived cars – all installed the Rover V8 into their cars. There were numerous concepts and prototypes with the Rover V8s too, and even a policespec Sherpa van. Again, charting everything would occupy another volume of the Rover V8 book series.
The variety of cars the engine was put into, and therefore the wide array of characteristics it needed to exhibit, meant there are almost as many different variations of the Rover V8. The different inlets alone would run into double figures – there are two distinctly different inlet manifolds just to mount four side-draught carburettors, swan neck and crossover.
Then you get into the complex world of all the different capacities. The first official increase in capacity was to 3.9-litre. It’ s here that John Eales comes into our story.‘ We sold Land Rover 20 3.9 short engines for their development programme. That’ s where the 3.9 came from.’ John established JE Engineering, his previous company, over 50 years ago. John is not the father of the Rover V8, clearly, if that accolade belongs to one person it’ s a GM employee. No, John is the V8’ s godfather. Someone who nurtured the engine, guided it along its life and helped it realise its true potential. Along with building race and modified engines, his engineering is woven into the Rover V8’ s development. Even if not officially.‘ They [ Land Rover ] changed the bore size from 93.5 to 94 millimetres so they didn’ t have to pay me any royalties. But we also then sold them the 4.2 …’
Top hat-style cylinder liners solve the Rover V8’ s main issue
24 The Engine Rebuilder Issue 04