Post by fugly on Mar 9, 2010 22:08:45 GMT -6
Everyone knows that Chrysler had a finger in the Lamborghini pie at one time... but did you know that Chrysler Australia sent a car to Italy's famous Weber factory in Bologna to perfect its 6-pack 265 race engine?
This engine had to race just as it came from the showroom, and it was up against Ford's 351 Cleveland V8, so it had to be good.
But it had to be good in other ways too. John Ellis, the young engineer in charge of the project, had to come home with carburetion that was smooth as silk in traffic, able to be simply serviced in remote areas by mechanics brought up on single choke Zeniths and Carters and produce prolific power in the race cars. Alongside the E38 race Charger, the E37 road version of the 6-pack was to be sold in large numbers.
Here's what it looked like:
there are some interesting facts about the development, we'll come to them soon.
Notice in the picture above how there's a couple of links on a shaft above the carbies to operate the throttles?
These have ball sockets at each end and function on balls on the levers off the shaft and on the carbies' throttle shafts. To balance the carbies you need to adjust these links so they are typically fitted with locknuts and left and right hand threads so you simply spin the middle part to adjust and then lock them in place.
But that adjustment was too coarse for John Ellis' taste. He wanted to get fine adjustments done very easily, so he designed links which had two right hand threads. But on one end the thread was coarse, on the other it was fine. Net result was a very fine adjustment with no frustration.
John drove thousands of miles road testing the Valiant on the Autostradas of Italy and through the towns and villages around Bologna. It was rapid, something very much out of the ordinary on Italian roads.
Sure, they have fast cars. Ferrari, Maserati and so on, but the average family Fiat isn't usually any bigger than a 2-litre four banger and here we have a 4.3-litre six with a huge carby choke for each of those six holes. He would have been pushing towards 275hp at this time, I would imagine, while later refinement brought it up to just over 300hp.
This engine had to race just as it came from the showroom, and it was up against Ford's 351 Cleveland V8, so it had to be good.
But it had to be good in other ways too. John Ellis, the young engineer in charge of the project, had to come home with carburetion that was smooth as silk in traffic, able to be simply serviced in remote areas by mechanics brought up on single choke Zeniths and Carters and produce prolific power in the race cars. Alongside the E38 race Charger, the E37 road version of the 6-pack was to be sold in large numbers.
Here's what it looked like:
there are some interesting facts about the development, we'll come to them soon.
Notice in the picture above how there's a couple of links on a shaft above the carbies to operate the throttles?
These have ball sockets at each end and function on balls on the levers off the shaft and on the carbies' throttle shafts. To balance the carbies you need to adjust these links so they are typically fitted with locknuts and left and right hand threads so you simply spin the middle part to adjust and then lock them in place.
But that adjustment was too coarse for John Ellis' taste. He wanted to get fine adjustments done very easily, so he designed links which had two right hand threads. But on one end the thread was coarse, on the other it was fine. Net result was a very fine adjustment with no frustration.
John drove thousands of miles road testing the Valiant on the Autostradas of Italy and through the towns and villages around Bologna. It was rapid, something very much out of the ordinary on Italian roads.
Sure, they have fast cars. Ferrari, Maserati and so on, but the average family Fiat isn't usually any bigger than a 2-litre four banger and here we have a 4.3-litre six with a huge carby choke for each of those six holes. He would have been pushing towards 275hp at this time, I would imagine, while later refinement brought it up to just over 300hp.