Quote:
Originally Posted by David C
A little further research - Page 118 of Setright's Bristol Cars and Engines - suggests more customisation but he refers to a Hemi head although it was polyspherical or semi-hemi. He also states that Bristol threw out the hydraulic lifters and substituted mechanical lifters but a bit of research on A series / Poly forums suggests that there was nothing unusual about solid lifters on stock US or Canadian 313 engines of the period.
So, as Stefan says, more shadowy rumours... If Setright could get it wrong only 15 years or so after it happened we will indeed have to wait for more factory correspondence to get a better idea of what really went on.
|
David, if my memory serves me correctly, I believe Setright recanted some of his claims in Bristol Cars and Engines in his later book, "A Private Car - An Account of The Bristol". In particular the story about the hydraulic lifters.
I believe Bristol had a habit of using superceded Dodge/Chrysler engines when they first started using V8s. They were virtually unknown in the UK at the time and Bristol were very happy to allow them to be shrouded in mystery. They alluded to improving or Bristolising the Chrysler products
which contributed to this. To be fair, Bristol were not the only expensive car makers at that time who stretched the truth a bit!
I wrote this many years ago:
If anyone wants to read more about the origins of the 313/318 engines I can recommend Automobile Quarterly Vol 32 No.3 in a 16 page article titled "Maple Leaf Mutants - Chryslers North of The Border". It's an interesting article, but it's so difficult to extract the exact facts from it could have been written by Setright, although it wasn't.
The article makes it pretty clear that the Canadian Chrysler owned brands were never allowed to be as good a spec as the US cars. So the Canadian Plymouth/Dodge mutants - the "Plodges" - always got engines and other features which were in US Chryslers a year or two before. Although it doesn't specifically say this in the article, I'd say the US simply didn't want the Canadians to have an engine which appeared to be the same as a US engine. So in Canada they made the 313, which was effectively the same engine as the 318 in the US. In another example of this policy, they also made some high performance 303 V8s in 1955/56 in Canada which were exported exclusively for US cars and not available in the local Canadian market. So, while the Canadian Plodges got the Super Red Ram 313 in 1957, the equivalent cars in the US were being sold with the first B series engines. The Canadians got the 245 bhp Power Pack version of the 313 in 1958, which of course the V8 Bristol started using in the early 1960s.