Yes, let’s get this out of the way early – honey-voiced, eyebrow enthusiast Roger Moore drove one of these, both as Simon Templar in The Saint and out in the real world.
And looking at it now, it might be the least Volvo-ish Volvo of all time, especially given the company’s form for the past four decades.
Just look at it – it isn’t boxy, it won’t carry a bookcase (even if you sprang for the shooting brake version) and it’s rear-wheel drive.
So how do we celebrate the Volvo that proved the Swedish safety enthusiasts knew how to play? By wedging in one of their most playful engines, that’s how.
The lightweight inline five is as characterful an engine as Volvo has ever made, with a warbling thrum that’d be the perfect accompaniment (or is that counterpoint?) to the sleek lines of the P1800.
Of course, we could have gone for the newer, twin-charged 2.0-litre four from the new Polestar, but even though it has power to burn, it doesn’t have the same character of the five-cylinder turbo.
And besides, the 2.5-litre is plenty powerful enough – 300bhp and 325lb ft in the second-gen Focus RS, for instance, which is about as much as Volvo’s 4.4-litre V8 – and it’s proved to be a reliable beast. Although, it must be said, not as reliable as the three million miles and counting that New York resident Irv Gordon has clocked up in his P1800 – on the original engine, no less.
And, thanks to an aluminium head and block, the 2.5 is relatively lightweight – which is vital. The old pushrod unit from the original P1800 is by no means the heaviest engine in the world, but its cast iron construction means that you can swap in a modern all-aluminium setup, with turbocharging and intercooling, without incurring a serious weight penalty.
Yes, it’ll take some serious forethought and engineering to use an engine designed for a transverse, front-drive setup and rejig it to work in a longitudinal, rear-drive application. But it was hard to break the sound barrier, travel to the bottom of the Mariana Trench and fly to the moon, wasn’t it?
We could have used the B21 ‘Redblock’ engine from the Volvo 200 Series, which was canted over to account for the added height of the new alloy head and the overhead cam it contained. And, with outputs approaching 200bhp in the turbo version, most would say that it’s more than enough for the P1800. Then there’s the fact that it’s already set up for rear-drive.
And we can’t really argue with any of that. But, y’know, five-cylinder. Come on, admit that it sounds cool. And besides, not every model will be a 300bhp monster. In fact, we’ll kick things off with a much more tame 220bhp from the standard 2.5T Mondeo from a few years back. A mid-spec version would bridge the gap, as mid-spec versions tend to, but it’d all be built around the idea of a longitudinal five-cylinder turbo. Lovely.
To get that power down to the road, we’d use the five-speed M90 transmission from the Volvo 960. As a five-speed, it’d be one up on the original four (with optional overdrive), which would be a much more modern solution to drive ratios.
The solid rear axle is all well and dandy for the standard P1800, but we’re not sure how safe it’d be with 300bhp on tap. Semi-trailing arms would be a step in the right direction, but we’d leapfrog that for a proper multilink rear end, teamed up with a limited-slip diff.
Brakes would be similarly uprated, with vented discs front and rear. We’d try to keep the wheels and tyres as small as physics will allow, to keep the dainty proportions of the P1800 to shine through. We would be removing the chunky bumpers, mind you, because that’s the cleanest expression of the original design (at least that’s what we’ll write on our website).
In terms of actual performance figures, the relatively heavy (for the time) P1800 would mean somewhere in the five and six seconds for a nought to sixty dash – depending on engine spec – which is about twice as quick as the original article and not shabby for more than 1.1 tons of Volvo. If you really got a good launch off in the 300bhp version, you might even see high fours. And that’s very not too shabby indeed. Top speed would be well in excess of the 110mph or so of the standard P1800, and probably around 165mph, considering the slippery bodywork.
The restomods would extend to the P1800 shooting brake, which might be what we’re most excited about. There’s something so wilfully wrong, and yet so wonderfully right, about a dainty two-door Volvo wagon with a snorting 300bhp five-cylinder under the bonnet. And let’s not forget that it got the nickname of ‘The Fish Van’ in Sweden and ‘Snow White’s Coffin’ in Germany.
Or if that’s not really your style, how about an Aston Martin V8? Yes, you read that correctly. Sounds like sacrilege, right? Wrong – it’s an historical homage.
Yes, happily enough, back in 1961, Aston Martin took a P1800 and fitted it with a 2.5-litre, four-cylinder prototype engine of its own making (see above). To fit the tall head and its dual overhead cams, they fitted a reshaped bonnet with a very large bulge in the middle. And this is a good thing.
It never made it past prototype stage, but we feel that this is enough of a reason to make a small run of Aston V8-powered P1800s, y’know, just to grab all the headlines. Then we’d settle into a comfortable future of taking turbo five-cylinder Volvo engines and combining them with the least boxy Volvo ever. Job done.
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