Special 313 engines? - 407 and 408 MK1

[Stefan]

Several different stories about this. Bristol only ever used tiny numbers of these engines so it's hard to expect Chrysler to " send engineers over".
Syd Lovesy told me " we just put the ancillaries on"- though there was a comment about extra sump baffling to prevent oil surge.
I understand a standard high output version was used by Bristol- "Police Chief Special" has been mentioned. Certainly there is lots of opportunities for performance tuning of these cleverly cast , tough and long lasting blocks.
One version circulated is that the Chrysler gearbox was ordered for testing- and arrived with a V8 attached- which Filton liked , at a time of sudden economic austerity.
Once the factory correspondence is sold off by the liquidators ( delayed by further legal action) and the Heritage Trust has a chance to obtain it all,
we will know a lot more and will have original documents as references.
. Meantime only shadowy rumours....

[David C]

I just found my reference. Page 260 of Christopher Balfour's "A very British Story"
This suggests Bristol engineers did some development of oil baffles that was later adopted by Chrysler. If so, no information on whether this was just Canadian built models.
It would be interesting to compare late 1950s Poly engines with those from the end of the 60s and even early LA models that shared bottom end components.

[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.

[Kevin H]

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.