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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 7 ก.พ. 2025
- 3 Most Forgotten V8 Beasts Now Extremely Rare!
Three remarkable machines that combined raw power with luxury in ways that were truly ahead of their time.
First up is the ultra-rare Gordon-Keeble GK1, a British grand tourer that perfectly blended Italian style with American muscle. Only 100 of these beauties were ever made between 1964 and 1967, making them incredibly special. Under the hood, a powerful Chevrolet Corvette V8 engine gave this car impressive performance, launching it from 0 to 60 mph in just 6 seconds - amazing for its time! The car's unique tortoise emblem came from a funny moment during a photo shoot when someone placed a passing tortoise on the hood, and the symbol stuck.
Next, we'll explore the Pontiac Grand Prix SJ with its mighty 455 V8 engine from the early 1970s. This wasn't your average luxury car - it was a true powerhouse that could compete with dedicated sports cars while keeping its passengers in total comfort. The 455 V8 engine produced an incredible 325 horsepower and enough torque to pull a house! With its long hood and clean design, the Grand Prix SJ represented the perfect mix of luxury and muscle car performance that defined an era of American automotive excellence.
Finally, we'll uncover the fascinating story of the Rover P5B Coupé, a car so important that the British government secretly stockpiled the last ones made in 1973. This elegant machine combined British luxury with American V8 power, courtesy of a 3.5-liter Buick engine. It became the favorite car of British Prime Ministers and even earned the approval of Queen Elizabeth II herself. The P5B Coupé's combination of power, comfort, and prestige made it the perfect vehicle for Britain's most powerful people, and it continued serving in government roles well into the 1980s.
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I had a P5b Saloon for 39 years. It did 386,000 miles from new and incredibly on the same engine and gearbox all down to regular maintenance. I did fit electronic ignition to it (Lumenition) i changed all oils and fluids at least annually quite often twice per annum.The V8 was a real workhorse. Super car, would have one again tomorrow!
Hi John, had a friend called John and was wondering if you were the same John I knew years back, I had a Cameroon Green P5B and another friend had an Arden Green P5B, if not no prob, best wishes and happy motoring.
a lovly car ,
The best description I ever heard regarding the Rover P5B was .." inside your surrounded by walnut,Wilton & leather, it's like a gentlemen's club on wheels".
El
We had a family acquaintance from Germany who lived in the U.K. and who had a P5B Rover. I first met him at a Christmas party and I asked in conversation if he was driving as I had noticed he had refused to have anything alcoholic to drink. He said he had arrived by car, “the white one across the road”. “Oh the P5B?” I asked and immediately he knew that we had a mutual interest in cars. He said he and his wife loved its unique character. They took it to Germany on holiday and had a terrible accident in it on the autobahn. The structure of the car was so well engineered that they survived the accident with his wife untouched and him suffering only minor injuries. After he had recovered he duly bought a second P5B that became his daily driver for many years until he eventually died of natural causes. I used to like the way it pulled away from the curb with its V8 burble like a power boat pulling away from landing stage.
I've owned a Rover P6B for 10 years putting nearly 50,000 miles on it. Nice motors those old Rovers.
Always wanted a P5B Coupe, a truly beautiful 🇬🇧 motor car.
thanks for this. A terrific video.
Proud owner of a 69 GP sj 428 and I cherish it
Taste is subjective. For me, the Rover P5B Coupe is one of the most beautiful cars I've ever seen . I suspect this may because its 'face' reminds me of a 1960s AEC Merryweather Marquis fire engine (and from an early age I was obsessed with fire engines).
I WANT A GK1❤...beautiful body with Chevy mechanicals...PERFECT.
I had a P5B when I got married in 1974, it only cost me £500, EOO 598 H, but it was when petrol went above a pound a gallon, great car 17mpg there was rust showing so it was sold. Very very comfortable, but now a BMW with just 2000 cc 184 bhp, madness!
Pontiac's idea of "clean lines" only serves to underline how great the preceding Gordon Keeble design was.
Y E S ! !
I have loved the Gordon Keeble since I first became aware of them in the late 60s. It had similar design element as the Jensen Interceptor.
I absolutely loved the one with black paint and red upholstery. That is, in my opinion, as good as Jaguar’s creamy white paint, wire wheels and red upholstery. Or almost as good!
Thanks for this wonderful video!
Another P5B former owner, I bought mine in 1986 at the grand age of 21, for the princely sum of £50, from a young electronics enginner at work who'd paid £995 ten months previous. My Dad strongly advised against the purchase, which was understandable as my rusty Minor 1000 had stood in his front garden for 4 years at that point. (it stayed another 13 years). As soon as he got home from work he fell in love with it, and within a week he'd replaced a track rod end and got it MOT'd. 17mpg on a good day, He took my Mum to Cornwall in it, a 700 mile round trip. Always misfiring on one or more cylinders, and after two dubiuos 'gearbox repairs' by shed amateurs, it was parked and forgotten about like the Morris. My folks paid around £4000 in council garage rent, when it was dragged back out many years later (for £500!) it was rotten and no longoer shone. Along the way, my Dad aquired a 'spare' 1968 Coupe which had been abandoned in the corner of a garden for years. We chopped it up and kept as many spares as we could, most of the big stuff went with my Dad's, but I've recently found boxes of instrument cowls from the Coupe! CKG72L was the reg if I recall, Zircon Blue with a cream half leather interior.
This channel stands as a testament to standing at a testament!
That Gordon-Keeble is one beautiful thing ! (Just for reference; I'm born in 1968).
- And came here to say:
I WANT ONE !!!
1969 Pontiac Grand Prix SJ 428 was no joke either.
And American aluminum V8 and a classic British saloon. No wonder the Queen drove one.
What a great piece of kit that Rover is
The good old days of auto manufacturing when you could tell year,make,and model at a glance. Every car was DIFFERENT in shape, contour, and design. Unlike today when the only difference in cars now is attachment points of body parts.( same fender different bolt locations...etc).😢
thank you,really enjoyed it.There is a mustard colour gordon keeble here on the isle of wight,its a beauty ,loved the info on the car and company thank you
the keebler would look great in my driveway ❗️
@@MH-fb5kr
Or *mine* , rather ❗
(I.e.: my dad could take your dad)!
interesting, the keeble has essentially the same powertrain as the Opel Diplomat. It also came with a 5.4liter corvette sourced V8, DeDion rear axle and disk brakes. Later also the Diplomat based Bitter CD.
Are you saying that the Opel Diplomat did have a 327 cubinc original in it.... but what about Opel Ambassador then!!
@@rvarsigfusson6163 only the diplomat had american V8. Diplomat A had the 4.9 liter and the Diplomat B had the 5.4 Liter. the lower models Kapitaen and Admiral had a straight 6.
@@uliwehner Thanks RESPECT.
What a gorgeous automobile.
That 8.5 CR 455 was perfect for turbocharging...we added 7psi to a 69 455 GP and got 584 rwhp and even with highway gears it ran in the 12s.
Who cares? Is this about you?
Beautiful car.
I don't like the headlights on the Gordon- Keeble. The rest is ahead of its day. Lovely emblem. Out of the three cars, I like that best.
Look up the Jensen CV8, it's worse.
I agree. The oval headlights base design is what keeps the overall design a bit lower than it could be. And also the grill could have been designed a little better. All the rest of the car is a masterpiece in design and ingenuity. I love the interior, and the back is to die for.
21:23 you mean the 215 c.i. engine? To best of my knowledge GM or Buick never made an all aluminum 350.
3.5 litre, not 350 cu.
At 25:18, you show (briefly) the weekly classic car and motorcycle evening on Weymouth Esplanade. It's still going strong every Thursday, April - September, and whilst you won't see many Rover P5s there, there are some lovely classics to be seen each week.
The engine in the rover is a Buick 215 cu-inc and was later on used in Ranger Rover at the beginning and later on change a little. Was it the right thing to do to put Solex carbs on it or not........
Hmmmmm a Corvette engine interesting. I like the black with a Red interior .
19:18 Rover P5
Our 65 Catalina Ventura was a great car
As a kid I would walk to school (very common early 80's UK) and I would walk past a Gordon Keeble (as well as a couple of Bristol's and a gorgeous Ford Consul mk II 375, this was NOT a seriously posh area, more very middle class). The Gordon Keeble in the flesh, it just looks right.
The Rover P5 is another one that 'looks right' and was known as a poor mans Rolls Royce. Poor being a relative statement
GK Rover P6 rear lights?
Looks like
It was the strangest thing in this film that shocked me. It was where you said that HM The Queen's Rover P5B was green. If you look at any pictures of royal cars, certainly state cars, they are a sort of dark burgundy colour, bar the odd Land Rover. OK Prince Charles's ( now HM the King) Aston Martin was burgundy nor was Princess Anne's (Anne The Princess Royal) Scimitar, but I don't know what colour that one was as she did have 9 of them, including the last one ever made. If you want to check what I am saying, at the Festival Of Speed in 2012 there was a display of Royal cars I was there and there will no doubt be film on YT of them.
The rear of the car resembles the Rover P6.
P5B had torsion bar front suspension, not coils.
Yes well spotted, also our honourable P Ms used Saloons not Coupé models🚙 L
In the modern world we don´t use any longer imperial fingers, thumbs, ellbows for dimensions and thimbles for liquids since the French Revolution 1789 ... It would be great to mention metric system dimensions for those not living in the past any longer
They only had one relatively small Keihin carb off a Japanese motorcycle.
It would have been nice to see more of the 2 door Rover P5 coupe rather than the 4 door saloon.
The P5B coupe had four doors too. The roofline was raked, that's all.
Rover could have used the Triumph V8 as fitted to the Stag but the unit was fraught with terrible reliability issues. The 3.5 was chosen as the "cheapest" option they could buy stateside that still had the minerals to power a heavy motor and found its way ironically into Triumph TR7s Range Rovers, Land Rovers and was even tested to power the Scorpion tank losing only narrowly to a Jaguar engine which gave the Scorpion its insane 70mph unheard of in an armoured unit lol The P6 that followed the P5 also was available with a V8, the development of the P6 was started before the P5 even went into production and incorporated a space age body design not seen since where every body panel was exchangeable and easily removed, it was also the first time a car was fitted with again "space age" interior parts that being plastic wood effect trimmings that were a fraction of the weight of walnut. BTW the front lights of the Keeble came from Triumph's Vitesse design, slanting quad lights were very much in vogue with Routemasters and Rolls Royces of that era sporting the quads but none had that look the Vitesse had. The 2 litre Vitesse, big six cylinder engine which went on to power 2.3 and 2.6 Rover SD1s in later years was fitted to a car with the body weight of a Mini making it a thoroughly overpowered little car.
To think the good people of Rover went to the trouble of putting a chrome acute 'accent' over the 'e' in coupe and still the commentator calls it a coup (as in chicken coup). Oh well, never mind.
Otherwise, apart from the usual wrong photos this is a well researched video.
The ioe engine came first in the Rover P3 (my first car) and ended in the P5 (which I also had the Mk 3 version.) Rolls Royce also used the IOE engine.
One wet night (about 1970) I was following lights down Birkdale road in Auckland NZ. At the point it changes to Beach Haven Road at a tight left turn, the red tail lights suddenly became headlights and then red again before it stopped. When I came to the car it was a Gordon Keeble with an ashen faced new owner swearing he would in the future be very careful with his right foot in the wet! Good looking car. Still the Aston Martin of the same design objective was at least as good looking, had a British higher revving quad cam V8 and from my experience of 5 years ownership it was stable enough in the wet.
2:05 Also the first car to be fitted with a CD player.😄
Wonder why no one has been able to make a business out of rebuilding P5/b back to new condition, I would love one if reliability was assured
Rust in the floor pan, front bulkhead and chassis…everywhere important really.
I owned the P5B great car had it for a number of years but it needed a bit of work sold it to someone from Blackpool regretted is as soon as he took it away
A great video, spoiled by inaccuracies and random images of a Jensen Interceptor. Also the Lancia Flaminia did NOT have four slightly sloped headlamps. The Pontial 455 cube V8 engine as not a marvel of automotive engineering, instead it was an underperforming lump, with points and a carburettor.
There were smallblock engines making more power than the majority of those Pontiac 455s. It also never had a Mikuni dirtbike carburetor nor did it have crank/cam sensor type electronic ignition... somebody got lazy when they put this video together.
Anybody spot that "cameo" silhouette of what appears to be Pres. Obama earlier in the video (0:43) masquerading as Gordon? And how many times was the Chevy engine's specs repeated again and again? If you wanna pad the video, at least use accurate and useful info.
us v8 powerd iso grifo , Monteverdi , jensen interceptor ,
Already covered them in previous videos
Add Bristol, TVR, AC and many more.
@@paulrobinson3649 like them to
It's Bertone, not Bertoni--though both have similar pronunciations.
The tortoise symbolised "Speed and Endurance". WHAT? Shome mishtake shurely?
I'm guessing here, but I think it's based on the tale of the tortoise and the hare. The tortoise won, hence the surrounding victory laurels.
British humour. Absurdity at its finest.
The maker of this video needs to check things more thoroughly - the car seen driving at around the 40 second mark is actually a later Aston Martin not a Gordon Keeble. Look at the very front of it, the grill and headlights are not the same.The air-scoop on the bonnet is different and the whole shape of the car is squarer than the Gordon Keeble which was more the fashion in the mid to late 1970's not the sixties !
Bertone is with a final 'E' not 'I' as misspelled at 1:40 approx.
is the Gordon Keeble designed by Touring? I would swear that was Lancia Flaminia Touring coupe coming at me if I saw it in the wild.
Edit; never mind . you said it was Bertone later in vid lol
Yes it does look a lot like the Lancia. Was at a car show once when I looked at an arriving car and thought 'Is that a Gordon Keeble?' Then realised it was a Lancia. At one time Italian design houses did have a habit of 'recycling' ideas for different manufacturers.
@grahambell4298 Totally, it happened a lot
It looks like the bastard love child of a Triumph Vitesse and a Rover P6.
the buick engine was not a masterpiece of engineering. it's size and wieght were what made it so useful for rover ,the fact it was aluminium and compact so could be used in cars smaller than ocean liners.
Do the elves come with it?
The 62 Grand Prix 2+2 Was the fastest car available that year with a 0-60 in the 4sec range if traction was there.
The Grand Prix and the 2+2 were 2 different models.
Keebles are nice. The front end on those SJs looks like it fell out of an ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down. there is one for sale for ages here in the UK, minter, needs nothing, £17K. P5B Coupes are everywhere, the best one in the World is only £30K 6 on e bay now.
The Grand Prix was not first, others like the Buick Riviera created that niche before, coke bottle design included
Computer aided design was 15 years later… many things are wrong in this video bertonE
GK was beaten by the CV8 mate!
"22 Gallons" for the fuel capacity of the Gordon Keeble...UK or American
😅"Coop". So American.
why was the 4 door Rover called a "coupe"?
Sloping roof line to the rear. Different from the actual saloon.
There have been many 4-door coupé cars, and the term does not define a car as needing 2 doors to qualify, as the tern means "cut", literally cut- down or reduced roofline.
That's not how Bertone is spelled.
I know where there are two off these covered in tarpaulin .
Send me a P5b!
I would hate to do a brake job on it. The rest Like.
The Obama silhouette.
your wrong about thatcher , she got rid of them in favour of new Jags , she was quoted as sayin they looked to old or somthin ti that effect , just like she did ti Brittsh industry , aye !
This is bullshit about the rover v8. it did not have coil springs at the front at all , it had torsion bar suspension up front and leaf springs at the back. and nothing at all like what is being shown for suspension at either end.
Get it wright it is spelt BERTONE !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
People who start new brands should be certain that there's a demand for what they're intending to produce. Aiming for the La-Dee-Dah fat wallet market kills a lot of these over the top attempts.
nothing rare about the rover . any vintage car club with 20+ members will have at least 1.
Was John Gordon black? Oh sorry. Was he a person of colour? I presume not. Why to depict him than as such?
But its not a very attractive car. Kind of stodgy.
mine is rarer than all of them...though not as attractive or desirable
Ir was the Queens beast long before...