<VV> Turbo Question

Bill Elliott Corvair at fnader.com
Thu May 19 14:15:42 EDT 2005


To be a little more specific, the Jetfire was a "bolt-on" turbo to the high performance version of the Olds aluminum 3500 V8. The free replacement was 
removing the turbo and adding the standard 4bbl carb and intake. For all of the effort, the Jetfire made little more power than the normal 4bbl version of the 
engine. This is the engine that was abandoned and sold to Rover where it became just about the most succcessful and longest-lived engine the Uk ever 
used, only going out of production around 2002. (I think only the British A-series... in production from the early 40's through 2001 had a longer run.. it first 
gained a turbo in 1983 and lost it by 1989.)

The first road-going application of a turbo on a non-US car was the extremely limited BMW 2002 Turbo of the early 70's (that had "Turbo" across the top of 
thw windscreen in reverse script show that it showed correctly in the rear view mirror of the car the BMW was overtaking. Scaremongers made BMW drop 
that... )

The first "modern" turbo application that approached the numbers of turbos that came on Corvairs was the 1978 SAAB 99 Turbo.

Bill Elliott

On Thu, 19 May 2005 10:58:45 -0700, Western Canada CORSA wrote:

>It was the first SUCCESSFUL production turbo.  The Olds Jetfire came off the
>line about a month earlier, but was a dismal failure, with GM eventually
>offering the replace the troublesome turbo with a V8.

>Regards,
>Joel

>-





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