Whoa! That's something I forgot about. Gas milage plummets over 70mph in a brick.

No, I've never had the opportunity to do more than a few minutes at such speeds either in the US as I'm generally an exceptionally safe driver. I've never had a single accident of any kind in 20 years of dealing with rush hour traffic and city streets. Those times were usually WAY out in some desert somewhere where I could survey what was ahead of me for many miles. Then, if my car, the road and most especially my tires were in very good shape, I'd take her up and see what she could do. After all, I'd only be taking *myself* out if anything happened.

But you've all pretty much answered my question: The consensus opinion is that a good hot high speed run is what the Volvo was designed to be able to handle on a daily basis.

I'd just like to note that I've driven a quite a few cars (once I was in the used car business), generally american 4-bangers at high rpms for a few minutes and afterwards the engine was never quite the same. Either some sort of roughness would creep in, or a knock or a ping -- i don't know whether there was some valve float going on that let somthing get bent or whether the cause was different each time. I never investigated much as usually american cars with 4-bangers are such junk that I really didn't care much -- I just wanted to make sure the B230F wasn't subject to the same limitations.

I like the point about the oil temperature gauge too. I had a friend who used to race Saab 900s and he toasted an engine that way. Oil temp went up, oil pressure went to zero. He switched to Mobil1 after than though and the problems went away.

Also, I'm assuming the European 740 had no external oil cooler or external transmission cooler or extra oil capacity, correct?