30-04-2020, 06:30 AM
Recently read of the story where Colin Chapman effectively created a 4-port head for the Seven-based engine in the Lotus Mark III, is it known whether the BMW 3/20, American Austin / Bantam and Nissan / Datsun engines featured two-inlet ports or more as well as whether all were capable of featuring production 4-port or even 5-port+ heads like on the later A-Series?
As an aside was it within pre-war Austin's ability to develop an engine that carried over the various Seven-based innovations from BMW, American Austin / Bantam, Nissan / Datsun and others? Would it be accurate to say the Big Seven and Eight engines come close to fulfilling the brief apart from featuring SVs, curious to know what could have been feasibly done in retrospect to improve the Seven or later Big Seven and Eight engines?
While such a pre-war engine would be unlikely to butterfly away the post-war A-Series, am intrigued by the idea of Austin basically developing a fairly close pre-war similarly long production life analogue of the Renault Billiancourt engine (used in the 4CV) and the Fiat 100 Series engine (used in the 600) both of which were certainly capable of being eligible for the 750 Formula in terms of displacement.
Know that Alec Issigonis had the Austin Seven engine in mind when he included some design elements of the former in the 9X prototype engine, that does bring up the question of whether Austin or later BMC could have developed an earlier OHV precursor to slot below the later A-Series.
As an aside was it within pre-war Austin's ability to develop an engine that carried over the various Seven-based innovations from BMW, American Austin / Bantam, Nissan / Datsun and others? Would it be accurate to say the Big Seven and Eight engines come close to fulfilling the brief apart from featuring SVs, curious to know what could have been feasibly done in retrospect to improve the Seven or later Big Seven and Eight engines?
While such a pre-war engine would be unlikely to butterfly away the post-war A-Series, am intrigued by the idea of Austin basically developing a fairly close pre-war similarly long production life analogue of the Renault Billiancourt engine (used in the 4CV) and the Fiat 100 Series engine (used in the 600) both of which were certainly capable of being eligible for the 750 Formula in terms of displacement.
Know that Alec Issigonis had the Austin Seven engine in mind when he included some design elements of the former in the 9X prototype engine, that does bring up the question of whether Austin or later BMC could have developed an earlier OHV precursor to slot below the later A-Series.