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The mkiv Supra Owners Club

Car or a plane?


Burna

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There was a guy by the name of John Dodd many moons ago (late 70's) who put a 27 litre merlin engine is a "one off" car. Got hauled over the coals by Rolls Royce because he put the RR Flying Lady and grill on the front of it, so he just upped and left to the canary islands or somewhere. The car still exists somewhere I think.

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In the 1960s John Dodd of Kent, England put a Merlin engine (some say it actually was a Rover Meteor tank engine, but then this is a Merlin minus superchargers) in a car called "The Beast". Originally it had a grille from a Rolls Royce, but after complaints from them he had to change it. According to himself he once drove by a Porsche driver on the autobahn and this person then called Rolls Royce asking about their "new model". The Beast was once listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the world's most powerful road car. The engine came from a Boulton Paul Balliol training aircraft and gave 1262 bhp (941 kW) at 8500 feet (2,600 m). In the car the supercharger was removed so it "only" gave about 850 bhp (630 kW). The chassis was custom made with a fibreglass body and used a gearbox from a GM 400. The car was later restored by John Dodd's son Paul Dodd and he also has a 2050 bhp (1530 kW) twin-supercharged Rolls-Royce Griffon 37 litre engine from a late-model Spitfire he is willing to put in a car if somebody would be interested in buying it.

 

some info I found, sorry no pics.

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Bry iam sure the later p-51s had the merlin largley due to the sucsess of the spitfire

 

They changed to the merlin after it was proved that the allison engine they were originally fitted with were pants at altitude.

 

Interesting point: the P-51 was designed in britain by a british engineer for the americans, the only reason the allison engine was chosen to begin with was due to the vast quantities of them being made over there, turns out (after the engine change) that the only thing about the P-51 that wasn't british was the factories they were built in.

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