Taylor Rover SD1

The Full Story 1976-1986
1. Auflage 2016
ISBN: 978-1-78500-192-5
Verlag: Crowood
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 208 Seiten

Rover's big hatchback saloon of the 1970s and 1980s had all the elements of a superb motor car. It was the work of long-standing Rover engineers, with substantial input from their colleagues at Triumph. The SD1's top models even shared their V8 engines with earlier and much-loved classics from Rover. It was stunningly attractive, cleverly derived from Italian supercar styling and still extraordinarily practical thanks to its large hatchback configuration. In this new book, Rover historian James Taylor tells the full story of the SD1, warts and all, from initial concept to final production model. The oft-criticized early models and the more successful later variants are discussed as well as the exclusive Vitesse and Vanden Plas models and overseas and police variants. Finally, for those inspired enough to seek one out today, there is guidance on purchase and ownership.

James Taylor has now written well over 100 books in all, and among them have been several definitive one-make or one-model titles, including a number for Crowood. He has also written for enthusiast magazines in several countries, has translated books from foreign languages, and delivers effective writing training in both the public and private sectors.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Taylor, James

Leseproben

CHAPTER ONE

EARLY DEVELOPMENT, 1969–1972

THE ROVER STORY

Although the Rover name remained constant during the production life of the SD1, the Rover identity was in an almost constant state of change. To document those changes in detail as they occurred would unnecessarily complicate the story of the car, so they are explained here as a way of providing some context for the story that follows.

Rover began making cars in 1904, and before that had been involved in the bicycle and sewing machine industries in Coventry. However, it was not until the 1930s that the company really made its name, under the guidance of brothers Spencer Wilks as managing director and Maurice Wilks as chief engineer. Rover became makers of ‘One of Britain’s Fine Cars’, as their publicity material put it, building discreet and elegant cars of high quality that were largely aimed at the professional middle classes.

This business continued after the Second World War when Rover moved to Solihull, to the south-east of Birmingham. The company was still guided by the Wilks brothers, and a younger generation of the Wilks family now joined as well. From 1948, car sales were supplemented by the light commercial Land Rover, which was a worldwide success and generated the profits that allowed the Rover Company to remain a viable, if small, independent car manufacturer.

Mergers – Rover within BLMC, 1967–1974

Rover’s days of independence were over by the time the Rover SD1 was launched in 1976. Prompted by mergers elsewhere in the British motor industry that threatened their body supplies, in early 1967 Rover sought refuge within the Leyland bus and truck group, which already owned car maker Standard-Triumph. During 1968, Leyland then merged with the other major British car combine, the British Motor Corporation (BMC), to become the British Leyland Motor Corporation (BLMC). Although little changed in the way Rover was run for a few years, it was inevitable that belonging to a larger combine, which united several formerly rival British car makers, would have an effect.

The first effects became apparent around the turn of the decade. In 1969, Rover’s planned new sports car (known as the P9 and due to be built under the Alvis name) was cancelled because of a clash with Jaguar. A further clash with Jaguar saw the new Rover P8 saloon cancelled in 1971. In 1972, Rover and Triumph were effectively merged when it became clear that their planned new executive-class saloons would compete against one another – and out of this merger came the car that would become the SD1.

Meanwhile, Rover’s management was changing, too, as the Wilks family lost its hold on the remains of the company and British Leyland began to hire professional managers to run its various businesses. The enormous and varied problems that would beset British Leyland over the next two decades made the subsequent history of Rover and its identity both complex and hard to follow.

In 1972, Rover ceased to exist as a separate business and became part of the merged Rover Triumph, which was a business within the British Leyland combine that now became known as the Specialist Division. The Specialist Division was headed by Bill Davis between 1972 and 1973, although other key management figures were former Rover men: Bernard Jackman became managing director and Spen King (a nephew of the Wilks brothers) became chief engineer. Former Rover man A. B. Smith became chairman in 1973, and then in 1974 former Triumph engineer John Lloyd became chief engineer when Spen King was moved to take overall charge of car engineering for British Leyland.

Nationalization – the British Leyland and BL Years, 1975–1986

BLMC’s losses had been mounting and at the end of 1974 the company turned to the British government for financial support to remain open and safeguard jobs. As a result, the company was nationalized; the last BLMC board meeting was on 24 April 1975 and the company was renamed British Leyland Ltd. Within that renamed company, the plan was for the individual car marques to be suppressed and for their operations to be united as Leyland Cars, which was run by Derek Whittaker. Within Leyland Cars, the former Rover, Triumph and Jaguar marques were to be united as the Large Cars division, which was run by Tony Thompson. This was the position when the SD1 was launched in 1976; formally, it was the new Rover from Leyland Cars, and all the publicity at the time of the launch made that very clear.

The years 1976 and 1977 saw some changes in top management, of which the most far-reaching was the appointment of Michael Edwardes (a highly competent professional manager rather than a car man) as chairman and CEO of British Leyland. Edwardes inherited a company that was once again on the verge of collapse, thanks to falling overseas sales and an epidemic of strikes within the workforce, and from July 1978 he made further changes.

British Leyland Ltd now became BL Ltd, and its Leyland Cars division became BL Cars Ltd. Jaguar Rover Triumph (JRT) was formed as a division of BL Cars, and Land Rover Ltd was created as a separate company. Head of BL Cars was Ray Horrocks, William Pratt Thompson was appointed head of JRT and Jeff Herbert became head of Rover Triumph. Jaguar was separately managed, and the plans to suppress the old marque names were abandoned. From 1980, JRT was split up yet again, and the Rover marque became part of the Light-Medium Cars division.

This arrangement lasted for two more years. Michael Edwardes, by now knighted for his achievement in keeping the company afloat, left in 1982 and a further reorganization ensued. Under Sir Austin Bide as chairman of BL Ltd, all the car marques except Jaguar and Land Rover were united as Austin Rover, with Harold Musgrove as its chairman. So it was as part of this group that the Rover name survived to the end of SD1 production in 1986. Yet, although the Rover Company had long since ceased to exist, the Rover name and what it stood for remained valuable business assets. As a result, in 1986, when there was yet another reorganization of what had begun as BLMC, the entire company was renamed the Rover Group under its new chairman, Graham Day.

FROM P10 TO SD1 VIA RD1

The chain of events that led to the introduction of the Rover SD1 in 1976 was immensely complicated, and was affected from the beginning by the twists and turns in the saga of British Leyland outlined above. Even though it carried the hugely respected name of Rover, the car was not purely a Rover design but a hybrid of Rover and Triumph design and components. Legend has it that there was a suggestion at one stage that it should not be a Rover at all but should instead carry Leyland badges.

Despite its excellent reputation for building well-made quality cars, Rover in the early 1960s was still a small independent manufacturer. Profits from booming Land Rover sales had enabled the company to move at the end of the 1950s from a single model range (coded P4) to two model ranges (P4 and P5), and then in 1963 to replace the older of those ranges with a very advanced new design (P6). However, this left the company with the problem of replacing both the P5 and the P6 ranges in the first half of the 1970s. Design and engineering resources were finite, so Rover planned to replace both model ranges with a single design. Work on what was known internally as the P8 began in 1964, making use of design and engineering resources freed up after the P6 had entered production in 1963.

However, the Rover plans were disrupted by corporate changes in the middle of the decade. Early in 1967, Rover merged with the Leyland truck and bus combine, which already owned Standard-Triumph and now planned to enlarge its car interests to rival the large BMC group, which owned Austin and Morris. BMC had also acquired Jaguar in 1966, and Leyland now planned to use Rover to counter the big Jaguar saloons.

One result of this was that Leyland instructed Rover to abandon work on the smaller-engined versions of the P8 and to focus on it as a large car that would compete with the Jaguars. This move left Rover with no replacement in prospect for its P6 range, so the company aimed to begin work on such a car as soon as designers and engineers could be spared from the P8 project.

As things were to turn out, the P8 never became a production model. After the Leyland-BMC merger that created BLMC in 1968, Rover found itself part of the same group as Jaguar. Belatedly recognizing the danger of competition between the two marques, the British Leyland board gave priority to Jaguar as a maker of large luxury saloons, and the P8 project was cancelled in 1971, a matter of weeks before the first pre-production cars were to be built.

The Rover people were not to know that back in 1969, by which time the bulk of the design and development had been completed on P8, and resources began to free up again. So they turned to the next new project, which was to design the replacement for the smaller Rover, the P6.

ROVER CAR PROJECTS, 1945–1976

The P code appears in Rover documents for the first time in 1945. There is no documented evidence for its significance, but a strong possibility is that it stood for Post-war.

PModel P was a series of mock-ups designed to modernize the appearance of the pre-war Rovers for post-war use. It was abandoned.

P2The P2 name has been applied to the revived pre-war models produced between December 1945 and early 1948.

P3An interim model, using pre-war styling on a new chassis with a new engine. It lasted in production from 1948 to...