14 Dec 06
Rover
Rover, like most car-makers, was involved in aeroplane-making during World War II. In the run-up to hostilities, the government put up the money for the company to build and operate a shadow factory - an extra production line - at Acocks Green to build parts for Bristol Hercules engines. This began to make components by summer 1937, but two years later Rover was tasked with building a much larger facility to build complete Hercules engines. Farmland at Solihull was requisitioned to build this factory, these days the Land Rover factory. Rover also went on to build the Bristol Pegasus and Armstrong-Siddeley Cheetah engines, structural parts for the Armstrong-Whitworth Albemarle (whose cockpit and front end were made by MG at Abingdon) and wings for the Lancaster bombers and Bristol-built fighters at various facilities.
Rover's most notable contribution to aviation was its role in the development of the jet engine, however. During WWII, the government asked Rover's engineering team to develop a turbojet prototype designed by Frank Whittle. The gas turbine engine first ran in 1941, with W2 and W2B prototypes following, but a breakdown in the relationship between Whittle and the Rover team meant that Whittle was cut out of the work on the successive B26 unit.
Gloster Meteor
Rolls-Royce, meanwhile, had been busy producing the Merlin V12 piston engine, but was interested in the new technology - once it had successfully completed tests in a Wellington bomber. As a specialist aero engine-maker, it was judged to be better suited to further develop the jet engine, and it took over the project. Rover, which did not wish to enter the aero engine sector long-term, took over manufacture of a Rolls-Royce V12 for tank use instead. The gas turbine engine, renamed the Rolls-Royce Welland, was subsequently fitted in the Gloster Meteor, the first fighter jet.
This wasn't quite the end of Rover's jet engine involvement, though. The wartime project inspired the JET 1 prototype, the world's first gas turbine car, created by Spencer King and Frank Bell who had been recruited from Rolls-Royce. The P4-bodied JET 1 (1950) achieved nearly 153mph in test runs, setting a land speed record, and was awarded the Dewar Trophy for innovation. Subsequent gas turbine prototypes included the glassfibre-bodied four-wheel-drive 100bhp T3 coupe (1956) and the front-wheel-drive 140bhp T4 (1962), but the best known was the Rover-BRM racing car driven at Le Mans in 1963 by Graham Hill and Richie Ginther.
However, JET 1, T3 and T4 had all shown pretty poor fuel economy, the T3 doing around 13mpg and the T4 little better at 20mpg. This, along with the cost of further developing the technology for production and the cost of its low-volume production, meant that the gas turbine project was killed off. The Rover-BRM car did, however, inspire a large number of turbine-powered racers in the US, used for oval racing, the Indycar and CanAm series, and a number of sports car and GT events.
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