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About the Buick-Pontiac-Olds 215
The engine
remains a milestone in American automotive technology in that it was
the first all-aluminum V8 designed specifically for volume production and
established itself well in the market, becoming the basis of an F-1 champion
and
many other applications domestic and foreign due to its favorable power
to
weight ratio and performance potential. The Buick engine was a much scaled
down
variant of the supercharged, hemi piston Le Sabre/XP-300 show cars of
the
time. I owned a 1962 F-85 with the Olds engine and remain impressed with
its
reliability and performance, no doubt the reason the engine remained in
production as long as it did.
The engine's history: the block and internals
were initially designed by Buick
engineers but Olds engineers designed their
own heads, valve train and pistons,
giving their block and head design a 6
bolt pattern around each combustion
chamber rather than 5 as in the Buick
design, illustrating that, at that time
(1960-61), each GM division had
considerable autonomy in designing its products.
Consequently, the Olds 215
is different from the Buick-Pontiac engine, stronger
and more powerful, and
was the basis of Brabham's Repco built F-1 World
Champion.
Torque of the
Olds 215 introduced in 1961 delivered 220 lb-ft versus Buick's
210, 155 hp vs
Buick's 150, largely due to Olds using flat-top pistons while
Buick used
dished pistons. The Buick powered Mickey Thompson's Indy 500 entries
in the
early 1960s as challengers to Ford's 260 based Lotus-Ford that
revolutionized Brickyard entries from traditional roadsters to rear engine
layouts. (See my book Indy's Wildest Decade)
Alex Gabbard
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