7 Cars With Awesome '2-Valve' Engines

Back before the days of fuel injection, multi-point nozzles and ever-more complex combustion chamber physics, most cars made do with a solitary inlet valve opposed by a matching exhaust valve. And this was no barrier to building great engines, as this list shows…

Peugeot 205 GTi

Let’s start with a four-pot, in the absolutely fantastic Peugeot 205 GTi. We’ve picked the 1.9-litre, 130bhp unit, which is our preference even though the fizzy 1.6 is also a gem. This eight-valve starlet proved that, at a time when 16-valve technology was beginning to filter down to affordable cars, you simply didn’t need the extra valves to produce a great engine.

Thanks to minimal soundproofing and a basic exhaust system, it even sounded far better than the four-cylinder cars of today. We love it, and if good ones weren’t so damn expensive then we might have at least one in the office.

Citroen Saxo VTR

Arguably less good, but more accessible and about as popular as oxygen was the eight-valve 1.6 in the Citroen Saxo VTR. It was always in the shadow of its 16-valve VTS brother, but since the latter cost a fortune to insure, most young lads bought the VTR. And then modified it, tuned it and thrashed it to within an inch of its life.

Its potential is why it’s on this list. It’s a willing little performer with up to 97bhp as standard, but it’s a brilliant blank canvas for any project.

Volkswagen Passat VR6

Let’s add a pair of cylinders, now, with Volkswagen’s remarkable VR6. The initials in the name come from the German words for ‘vee engine’ and ‘in-line engine’, because rather than two banks of three cylinders the VR6 squeezed a 15-degree V6 into a staggered line in one block. It’s a fascinating bit of engineering that’s still used today in projects like the W16 Bugatti Veyron and Chiron, plus in W12s found in everything from Passats to Continental GTs.

The 12-valve 2.8-litre engine that Volkswagen originally designed produced 172bhp and 177lb ft, which doesn’t seem like a lot by today’s standards, but couple a fruity exhaust to it and you have better noise than you might expect. High-mileage examples are pretty cheap in the classifieds, too.

Alfa Romeo 33 Stradale

Adding two more cylinders gets us to the astonishing Alfa Romeo 33 Stradale, which was derived from a racing car that shared much of the same running gear. Built and named for the street, the Stradale’s 2.0-litre V8 could produce 230bhp at a stratospheric 8800rpm. This was in 1967! Again, the engine needed just one inlet and one exhaust valve per cylinder to make this happen.

Another amazing factor in what makes the 33 Stradale such an icon is its kerb weight. At just 700kg, four strong men with the right equipment could just about pick it up and carry it off. But, given that it has no door locks, if you do buy one you might not want to leave it lying around anyway.

MG ZT 260

At the other end of the 16-valve V8 spectrum is the beautifully characterful Ford modular V8 first seen in 1991. We’ve picked its use in the MG ZT as an example, where it pumped out a lazy 258bhp but plenty of torque, at 300lb ft. But the list of cars it saw service in is incredible, spanning Crown Victoria Police Interceptors, Mustangs and F-series pickups. It’s even still in service in the disabled-accessible Mobility Ventures MV-1.

Initially it produced just 188bhp, and was overshadowed by a much more powerful 32-valve version just a couple of years later, but clearly held its own well enough to stay in production for more than two decades.

Ferrari 275 GTB

The Ferrari 275 GTB is one of the prettiest cars ever made, and under the bonnet is a Colombo 60-degree V12 with just 24 valves overall. It was one of the last Ferraris to use the engine family, after its initial design early in the 1950s, but it was probably the finest. The carburetted 3.3 is among the most characterful and best-sounding engines of the era.

The 3.3-litre unit produced 280-300bhp during its lifetime. There was also a run of racing versions, called Competizione Speciales (our Italian isn’t great but we think we get this), which went through a massive weight reduction programme throughout. Amazingly, the whole thing was scaled down by 10 per cent as part of the savings.

Lamborghini Miura

Speaking of beautiful Italian sports cars, the legendary Lamborghini Miura is another of history’s stars with a two-valve engine. The V12 was based on the 3.5-litre one in the 350GT, but with capacity boosted to 3.9 litres. After the 350GT had failed to make quite the dramatic impact that Ferruccio Lamborghini had hoped, the Miura brought 345bhp and the start of Lamborghini’s phenomenal era of designing the world’s best poster cars.