Alex, From what I understand it's a common practice for manufacturers to buy their competitors products for many reasons. And no doubt the similarities between Packards and various Russian built cars is more than co-incidence. Doubt that Packard or anybody else would have won a patent rights/copyright or any sort of court case in the USSR during the cold-war years. And yes, it is a great Site with a good bunch of people on board.

If I am interpreting the drawing correctly the number 6 indicates the intake ports. In that case this head has a rather unusual layout with the valves arranged IE IE IE IE. The more usual arrangement is EI IE EI IE with the intakes paired up and the middle exhaust ports also paired up. In the fifties all GM V8s had this layout as did Ford, Mercury, Lincoln, Studebaker and AMC. The only company with the IE IE IE IE arrangement was Chrysler in their hemi head and polysphere head engines.And they never used the conventional wedge head. Later Ford used the same layout in their small block V8 (289 etc) but that one did not come out until 1962. So it appears the Russians did not copy any Detroit V8 as this valve arrangement, combined with the wedge type combustion chamber with valves all in a row, did not appear on any Detroit V8 before 1962.

Not exactly true. The Pontiac Ram Air V had this arrangement too, and probably the Ford Tunnelport from which the Pontiac RAV was almost a direct copy. There are issues with valve arrangement vs head bolt arrangement. On Pontiacs, there were 4 common bolt holes per cylinder, but on Packard there were 5. Therefore the EIIEEIIE arrangement forced Packard (and others like Pontiac) to siameze the center exhaust ports. Pontiac's 4 bolt per cylinder allowed them to go to the EIEIIEIE arrangement (Ram Air V) without difficulty, but that would not have worked easily for Packard. None of this applies to the Russian version of course, it is just interesting from an engineering point of view, IMO. Craig

The angled distributor driving an external oil pump is more akin to the big block Mopar B-series engines than the vertical drive and internal oil pump of the Packard V8. thnx, jack vines

Diskovod--was the Chaika engine developed for that car, or was it developed for another use (agricultural, military or marine) and adapted for the Chaika? I know in the past there was a perception in the US, probably fueld by cold war rhetoric, that the USSR didn't really develop autos or their powerplants from the ground up as a whole, but rather they tended to use powerplants that the state was already producing for other uses. I would be interested on your take on this.