You seem to know what you are talking about, so perhaps you can answer a question that has been bugging me for years.
I seem to recall that BLMC once made a "slant 4" that was taken up by SAAB, and was subsequently doubled up into a V8 and put into the Triumph Stag. Is this true?
I’m a bit surprised that no-one else has jumped in here, but yes Brian, you’re more or less correct, the Triumph Design Centre were contracted by Saab to develop a slant four OHC engine to fit under the bonnet of the FWD Saab 99. Later, when Triumph themselves needed a new model, they took this engine down from the shelf, increased the bore to raise capacity from 1709 to 1850cc, and put it in a RWD version of the Triumph 1500 shell to create the Dolomite. Around the same time, British Leyland had swallowed up Rover, and legendary engineer Spen King started work on the 1850 engine, increasing the bore yet again to produce the 1998cc Dolomite Sprint, a brilliantly clever design that worked 16 valves off a single camshaft. I was at Lotus at the time, and we bought one to look at, the Lotus people were very impressed. To put all this into perspective though, the output of a Dolly Sprint was 127bhp, which isn’t much from two litres by today’s standards, Lotus were getting an easy 130bhp from their big-valve 1558cc Twincam at the time with better reliability. I never owned a Dolomite Sprint, though I’ve driven a few, and all they tended to oversteer, a bit of a handful driven quickly on a wet road, and an awful lot must have disappeared through hedges, travelling quite quickly backwards. It’s a gross oversimplification, but the Triumph Stag V8 was essentially two Dolomite engines on a common crankcase. As a driving experience, the Stag must have been loved by everyone who sat behind the wheel, one of the very best engines of it’s day, though ownership was a different matter. Design faults and the usual BL engineering and assembly problems meant that the V8s were chronically unreliable, just where do I start? The crankshaft bearings were too small, though this was corrected in later versions, but the car’s main problem was overheating. Bad casting techniques meant that water couldn’t circulate properly through the iron block, and poor quality aluminium heads warped at the first sign of trouble. There was also a fault in the timing chain design, these used to stretch and snap with inevitable engine-wrecking consequences. The Dolomite was a success, but the Stag ruined Triumph’s reputation and cost them a fortune. However, a derivative of the original slant four in much developed form, lives on under the bonnets of petrol powered Saabs to this day, and an excellent (though thirsty) engine it is too. Anyone want to hear the story of how I once refused an almost free Triumph Stag (overruled by then wife), some time in the mid 1980s?
