From 1937 to 1940 in the USA, Ford offered a miniature version of the famed flathead V8 and called it the V8-60.

The story of Henry Ford’s baby, the 60-horsepower V8, opens with a false start. In 1934-35, Ford of Dearborn designed and produced a smaller, 2.2-liter version of the company’s standard V8 for its European divisions in Dagenham, England and Strasbourg, France. A curious piece of engineering, this first version featured four main bearings and only two exhaust ports per bank, and it was plagued with issues, especially overheating. Only around 3300 examples were produced and scarcely a handful of them exist today.

However, the effort was encouraging enough to inspire a second, redesigned V8 for Europe, which was then introduced in the United States in 1937 as the V8-60. In Britain it was commonly known as the 22 hp V8, in reference to its taxable power rating, while in the USA the Ford ad writers called it the “Thrifty Sixty.”

The refined V8-60 of 1937, above, was very much a miniaturized version of the original flathead Ford V8 introduced in 1932, with its displacement scaled down from 221 cubic inches to a dinky 136 cubic inches. The bore was a petite 2.60 inches; the stroke 3.20 inches, and the rated output was 60 hp, compared to 85 hp for the senior ’37 V8.

One novel V8-60 feature was the front engine support casting, which doubled as the timing cover and mount for the ignition distributor and twin water pumps. The two Ford V8s, big and little, are similar enough in general appearance that they are sometimes confused by the casual observer. One foolproof way to identify the V8-60: There are only 17 head bolts per cylinder bank, while the standard V8 employs 21 or 24 fasteners per side.

Another distinctive V8-60 feature, in early production anyway, was an innovation that became known as the “tinside.” The cooling jacket on each bank was closed out with a sheet metal plate electrically welded in place (above). Many thousands of these V8-60 blocks were produced before Ford reverted to a conventional casting, and they are not terribly uncommon on the collector car scene today. (Some unknown number of experimental blocks for the big Ford V8 were also manufactured this way.)

The dynamometer chart above tells both the good news and the bad news. Despite its puny displacement, the V8-60 developed 60 hp at 3500 rpm, and if one was willing to wind it a little tighter, 65 hp was available at 4000 rpm, matching the 65 hp of the original 1932 big Ford V8. That’s nearly .48 hp per cubic inch, not too shabby for 1937. But the chart also plainly illustrates the engine’s greatest shortcoming: Peak torque is less than 100 lb-ft at 2500 rpm, falling nearly 50 percent behind its V8 big brother. The  available torque is even less than in the Ford Model A’s four-banger.

Ford buyers were attracted to the V8-60’s fuel economy, and sales were brisk. But sales quickly trailed off as the word got out about the engine’s poor acceleration. The V8-60 was discontinued in the USA after 1940, and Ford joined the herd with an L-head straight six as its economy engine in 1941. (The V8-60 would continue in production overseas after World War II and outside the Ford family of cars, but that’s a story for another day.)  Henry Ford was justifiably proud of his V8s, but his views on six-cylinder engines were mixed. What he thought of the 1941 six in particular has, as far as we can find, never been documented.

While the V8-60 was a weak performer on the highway, the picture was quite different in racing, especially in the categories with displacement limits, where its small size was an attribute. For example, in power boats and in oval midget racing, which was wildly popular in the ’30s and ’40s, the V8-60s could more than hold their own. Just as with the big Ford flathead V8, every kind of aftermarket speed equipment was available (below). Suppliers included Edelbrock, Eddie Meyer, and even Ardun. With a capable driver and sometimes, a stiff load of nitromethane fuel, a good V8-60 midget could run respectably with the purebred Offy-powered racers. In midget racing, the V8-60 was still a common sight well into the 1950s.