Every year I attend the LS Fest, I make it a personal mission to hunt down the non-GM vehicles that are competing. What can I say…I enjoy reading hate mail. And I’ve earned quite a bit of it over plenty of cars I’ve shown pictures of. It is actually one of the more enjoyable things about LS Fest to me: this is one engine series, but there is a wide field of vehicles, both GM and non-GM, that show up. It’s a testament to the user-friendly nature of the LS series. You hunt a junkyard, you score an engine, you use basic hop-up techniques to make as much power as you can afford, and you can run the gamut from a daily driver with a bit of a punch to four-digit horsepower figures and the ability to destroy all comers…it’s your choice.
During one of my breaks in the timing tower, Lohnes asked me if I had seen the Rolls-Royce around the staging lanes, and all that was in my head was confusion: I was the one out in the sun, he was the one in the air conditioning, yet he saw a Roller in the lanes at LS Fest. I was almost ready to attribute the confusion to something he must’ve ate for breakfast, but then I saw the car myself. I don’t know how to fully explain my thoughts: it’s disgusting enough that you can understand why it was chosen, it’s together enough that it’s driver material, and when it laid down an 11.50-ish lap, both Lohnes and I sat, staring out the window for a moment, in a cloud of “WTF just happened?” We dig the tank, and so did BigKleib34, who chased down the LS Roller and got the details on one of the more unique rides rolling around Beech Bend this past weekend:
Oh man ! Geordie ! Where are you ? You o.k ?
He musta fell off of his island again!
He went too near the edge and it capsized.
What this idiot doesn’t understand is that the Rolls Royce motor he junked was in fact a copy of a Chrysler motor. Rolls Royce just made it out of aluminium to save weight and strangled it with two SU carbs so it wouldn’t be too powerful to spill the champagne its owners were quaffing in the back seat. So it could easily be bored out to 440 ci and use a Chrysler crank and rods. Then with either two four barrels, EFI, twin turbos or a GMC blower it would make way more horsepower than the Loathsome Slug. But that would mean having a brain which is something LS addicts can only dream about. In fact a Rolls Royce motor should fit into any Chrysler car from the 60s and 70s to give alloy block and heads where such a motor wasn’t available from the factory,
The Rolls-Royce/Bentley L410 all-aluminium V8 cannot share the crankshaft from any Chrysler engine I know of. The bore centre of an L410 is 4.75 inches. Prior to the introduction of the L410 engine, the Chrysler Corporation used 4.09-, 4.1875-, 4.3125-, 4.460-, and 4.5625-inch bore centre engine blocks amongst their four divisions in hemispherical head and polyspherical head configurations. These division-specific engines couldn’t share a crankshaft amongst one another much less with a Rolls-Royce/Bentley L410.
The closest-sized Chrysler engine blocks were indeed the Chrysler B and RB blocks (wedge or hemi), but they have a 4.800 inch bore centre and were introduced AFTER, not BEFORE the L410. I’m not aware that Chrysler copied Rolls-Royce/Bentley here, but it would’ve been interesting to see Rolls-Royce/Bentley use hemispherical heads based, say, on those of the first-generation Chrysler hemis. Sadly, this did not occur.
Mind you, all AMC V8s and Buick 400/430/455 blocks had 4.75-inch bore centres, though. Seeing an L410 in a 1963-1965 Buick Riviera or an AMC AMX would be rather unusual…
Rolls-Royce/Bentley used Borg-Warner or GM Hydramatic automatic transmissions in the early days, so fitting an L410 to a Chrysler transmission in any Mopar car to one not would seem to be a worthwhile effort .
That said, this drag racer could’ve/should’ve simply installed a turbocharged engine…or just the turbocharger set up…from a newer Rolls-Royce/Bentley. It would’ve been more interesting to see one of these being used in a drag race car than the predictably inexpensive though undoubtedly excellent result he did obtain from this rather boring (no pun here…honest) LS-based effort.
It’s unfortunate that the Rolls-Royce/Bentley independent rear suspension was swapped out for the dull, default Ford stick axle. But, that’s drag racing for you.
You are very well informed!
I think that a twin turbo’d Rolla Royce engine would have been interesting but that would have been original and beyond the limited brain power of this Loathsome Slug addict..
Nearly beat the Chevelle!
Not a shameful performance.