All - Did you know that..............

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Mon 4 Mar 2013 18:08
All - Did you know that.............. - Cluedo

I was just looking at pictures of the new Bentley Flying Spur which I think is a fantastic looking car which is strange for me because I do not like the look of many Bentleys and think the Rollers look much better.

The pictures of the car I have seen all have the registration 3500 TU.

Did you know that the TU stands for Test Unit and identifies Bentleys own factory test and press cars etc. I was told about the TU registrations by the Father of a Bentley designer.

This got me thinking - does anyone else know of any useless snippets that they could share with us related to motoring ?

Cheers.

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Mon 4 Mar 2013 19:24
All - Did you know that.............. - craig-pd130

When Jaguar's design team was developing the 80s XJ40 saloon, they were so concerned that British Leyland would interfere and insist on installing the Rover V8 that they purposely designed the inner wings and engine bay so it would only take Jag's straight 6. This is why it took 8 years from launch for the V12 to be available in the bodyshell.

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Mon 4 Mar 2013 20:14
All - Did you know that.............. - tony g
Back in 2001 ,I was working for Lexus in leeds ,We bought an LS 400 in pearl white from a local trader .

The cars only previous keeper was jaguar cars ,browns lane ,Coventry .

When we inspected the car we could see that the engine had been dismantled ,blue jointing compound was visible on the seals .

The customer who bought the car ,kept the original v5 to frame , and applied for a replacement .

How much later than 1990 did jaguar bring out thier own 4 litre V8 ,did the Lexus v8 act as blue print for it ?
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Mon 4 Mar 2013 22:19
All - Did you know that.............. - galileo

This got me thinking - does anyone else know of any useless snippets that they could share with us related to motoring ?

In the late 1970s I worked with Engineers developing fan drives. Needing to collect special parts one day when all the pool cars were out, the Development Department lent me a left hand drive diesel Golf which they had imported and fitted with an experimental turbo. My impression was it was decidedly quick, surprised expressions at the traffic light drag race.

Earlier they had turbocharged a petrol Escort.

The powers that be eventually put a stop to spending time on car turbos - not core business and low margin.

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Tue 5 Mar 2013 08:33
All - Did you know that.............. - TeeCee

The bloke who lived next door to my parents was something fairly important on the development side at Austin-Rovers.

One day he turned up in a new MG Montego Turbo. I took the opportunity to ask the obvious question: Why did they elect to turbocharge the carb engine rather than the EFi, given that blowing an injected unit is simpler?

The answer was that they had orginally gone for the EFi unit and the change had caused no end of problems and delays, as it took them some time to get the setup they eventually went with to fit under the bonnet.

The reason? When the first prototype went out on the test track, their test driver came back with the verdict that it was too dangerous to put into production. He'd soiled himself at 150mph and the thing would have gone faster than that. Also, at lower speeds, the amount of power the thing generated was way beyond the capabilies of the chassis. Losing the injection dropped a sufficient number of horses to keep the performance at manageable levels.

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Tue 5 Mar 2013 11:50
All - Did you know that.............. - unthrottled

Losing the injection dropped a sufficient number of horses to keep the performance at manageable levels.

That sounds like company spin to me! There's not a huge amount of extra power to be founnd simply from switching an SU carb to throttle body injection. Multipoint injection was never going to be easy on a siamesed port head. So they came up with the wheeze that the carb was for the customers' own good.

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Tue 5 Mar 2013 13:49
All - Did you know that.............. - madf

AGree with unthrottled.


To reduce turbo power, dial down the boost, and away you go.

Bull excrement.

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Tue 5 Mar 2013 18:42
All - Did you know that.............. - Sofa Spud

The 'TU' registrations date back to when Bentley was owned by Rolls-Royce Ltd. TU was a Cheshire registration and the Rolls-Royce factory was at Crewe. The various TU registrations were used on Rollers as well as Bentleys. I've never heard of TU standing for 'test unit'. I think it was just that TU was a Cheshire mark, as was LG, as featured on the 100 LG registration that was used for a long time on the Rolls-Royce press fleet.

The snippet I want to share is also to do with Rolls-Royce / Bentley. It's that Rolls-Royce Motors came very close to taking over Foden, the former lorry maker, in the 1970's.

This leads to another snippet. A member of the Foden family, Edwin Richard Foden, left the company to start his own lorry manufacturing business - E. R. Foden - or ERF.

This in turn leads to another snipped. Henry Ford had 2 previous attempts at starting a car manufacturing business before he started the Ford Motor Company. The first one failed, but the second one, the Henry Ford Company, was successful. But Ford fell out with the other directors and left, so the company had to be renamed - as Cadillac.

Edited by Sofa Spud on 05/03/2013 at 18:49

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Tue 5 Mar 2013 19:02
All - Did you know that.............. - Sofa Spud

In 1948 Jaguar launched their legendary sports car, the XK120. But the base model at the launch was supposed to be the XK100, with a 4-cylinder version of the XK engine. However, there was no interest in the 4-cylinder version so only the 6-cylinder XK120 went into production. Decades later, several of the XK100 4-cylinder engines were discovered in a dark corner of the Jaguar factory.

One of the biggest flops in motoring history was the Lea-Francis Lynx, a bulbous, ugly sports car launched in the early 1960's. Three prototypes were built and displayed at the Earl's Court motor show, but no orders were taken. The story I've heard about the awkward styling is that it was based on someone's recall of styling sketches for the Jaguar Mark 10 that they'd glimpsed - and the Mark 10 wasn't exactly a looker either!

Edited by Sofa Spud on 05/03/2013 at 19:05

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Tue 5 Mar 2013 20:13
All - Did you know that.............. - Sofa Spud

OK - After consulting an inside contact, I now have the definitive answer regarding the 'TU' registrations used on the Bentley and Rolls-Royce press fleet cars.

In the early 1960's, when the year suffixes were introduced, the Rolls-Royce management felt it desirable to have a fleet of cars whose age couldn't be easily determined from their number plates. So they acquired the registration 100LG to start with, and were later offered 20TU, which initially went onto the car of one of the company's directors called Whitney Straight. The company was offered more TU registrations and used 1800TU, 1900TU and 3500TU on their fleet, among others. I'm told categorically that TU did not stand for 'test unit' but was just a local registration mark to Crewe in Cheshire.

What Rolls-Royce would have liked, but it eluded them, was the registration RR1.

Other makers had personality registrations that they transferred from car to car - Aston Martin had AML1 (Aston Martin Lagonda) and Bristol Cars had 100MPH.

Edited by Sofa Spud on 05/03/2013 at 20:22

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Wed 6 Mar 2013 19:33
All - Did you know that.............. - Duncan112

Not quite motoring but Rolls Royce related - when RB series jet engines are referred to (RB 211; RB108 etc) the RB stands for Rolls Barnoldswick where the engines were developed - another motoring link the jet business was acquired from Rover after WW2

PS as an engineer I would prefer it to be Royce Barnoldswick - one can but dream!!

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Wed 6 Mar 2013 22:10
All - Did you know that.............. - RT

Not quite motoring but Rolls Royce related - when RB series jet engines are referred to (RB 211; RB108 etc) the RB stands for Rolls Barnoldswick where the engines were developed - another motoring link the jet business was acquired from Rover after WW2

PS as an engineer I would prefer it to be Royce Barnoldswick - one can but dream!!

Nonsense!

The RB series of jet engines refers to those developed by the joint company after Bristol Siddeley were takenover by R-R, the R referring to R-R and the B referring to Bristol.

R-R Barnoldswick was primarily concerned with rockets, not jet engines.

Rover's jet interests were aquired early on during WW2 - basically a government-organised swap so that R-R would use their aero engine experience to develop jet engines and in return Rover got to licence-build the R-R Meteor tank engine, a very de-tuned development of the R-R Merlin - Rover retain rights to use Whittle jet designs as a basis for car jet engines.

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Wed 6 Mar 2013 22:33
All - Did you know that.............. - RT
R-R Barnoldswick was primarily concerned with rockets, not jet engines.

My memory isn't as good as it used to be, and the edit facility disappears too quickly !

It was R-R Spadeadam that dealt with rockets.

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Fri 8 Mar 2013 09:47
All - Did you know that.............. - Duncan112

Not quite motoring but Rolls Royce related - when RB series jet engines are referred to (RB 211; RB108 etc) the RB stands for Rolls Barnoldswick where the engines were developed - another motoring link the jet business was acquired from Rover after WW2

PS as an engineer I would prefer it to be Royce Barnoldswick - one can but dream!!

Nonsense!

The RB series of jet engines refers to those developed by the joint company after Bristol Siddeley were takenover by R-R, the R referring to R-R and the B referring to Bristol.

R-R Barnoldswick was primarily concerned with rockets, not jet engines.

Rover's jet interests were aquired early on during WW2 - basically a government-organised swap so that R-R would use their aero engine experience to develop jet engines and in return Rover got to licence-build the R-R Meteor tank engine, a very de-tuned development of the R-R Merlin - Rover retain rights to use Whittle jet designs as a basis for car jet engines.

Only going on information from "The Magic of a Name" - the Official history of the Aero Engine Division - well worth a read

I quote.."In 1940 the Rover Company moved it's aero engine repair and research facilities into (Barnoldswick) and installed a man called Whittle in Bankfield Shed which was at one time the largest single weaving shed in Lancashire. In 1942 Rolls Royce swapped a tank factory for Whittles and Bankfield. From then on the suffix of the type numbers of the engines were changed from W to RB - Rolls Barnoldswick"

Use of the RB prefix well predates the 1968 purchase of Bristol's aero engine interests by RR

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Wed 6 Mar 2013 21:59
All - Did you know that.............. - RT

The snippet I want to share is also to do with Rolls-Royce / Bentley. It's that Rolls-Royce Motors came very close to taking over Foden, the former lorry maker, in the 1970's.

The timing/naming on that snippet may be out - Rolls Royce Motors wasn't formed until 1971 when Rolls-Royce Ltd went bust - previous to that it had been known as Rolls-Royce (Cars Division) to distinguish it from other divisions such as Diesels, Aero Engines, and others deliberately misnamed so as to hide their true identity (for military purposes).

It would have been the pre-1971 Diesel Division that may have been interested in Foden, as Foden was the main truck maker using the R-R Eagle engine built by the Diesel Division.

Some snippets from my time as an apprentice at Rolls-Royce - the company is never known internally as Rolls or Rolls-Royce, it's always known as Royce's in fond memory of Henry Royce who was very much a hands on Chief Engineer - the ill-fated BL Princess 4 litre R using an engine built bt R-R Diesels Division, not the Car Division - R-R Diesel Division used to make the toolkits for the Car Division, to meet sales of 2,500 /year they had to make 4,500 toolkits /year because production "losses" were so high

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Thu 7 Mar 2013 12:54
All - Did you know that.............. - Sofa Spud

QUOTE:...""The timing/naming on that snippet may be out - Rolls Royce Motors wasn't formed until 1971 when Rolls-Royce Ltd went bust - previous to that it had been known as Rolls-Royce (Cars Division) to distinguish it from other divisions such as Diesels, Aero Engines, and others deliberately misnamed so as to hide their true identity (for military purposes).""

I know that and my timing is not out. It was Rolls-Royce Motors that was possibly going to take over Fodens. I'm not sure whether it was when post 1971 RRM was independent or later, when it was owned by Vickers. I think it was at a time when Foden was in trouble and so possibly the deal would have been something of a rescue. I don't know how far the discussions went.

Rolls-Royce was also known as 'Crewe' and 'The Company' by RR employees who worked elsewhere.

Edited by Sofa Spud on 07/03/2013 at 13:09

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Thu 7 Mar 2013 13:11
All - Did you know that.............. - Sofa Spud

Update on previous post: Rolls-Royce bid for Foden was in 1977.

link: archive.commercialmotor.com/article/1st-july-1977/...n

Edited by Sofa Spud on 07/03/2013 at 13:12

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Thu 7 Mar 2013 13:49
All - Did you know that.............. - RT

Update on previous post: Rolls-Royce bid for Foden was in 1977.

link: archive.commercialmotor.com/article/1st-july-1977/...n

Then I stand corrected on the timing . The diesel business was subsequently sold to Perkins and the Sentinel Works at Shrewsbury where the R-R diesels were built was eventually demolished and replaced by a supermarket

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