Yes, British Leyland did actually make some great cars
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British Leyland: a reliable source of jokes for ‘Fawlty Towers’, Private Eye and anyone searching for a symbol of Failing Britain in the 1970s.
And it was also, briefly, the second biggest car company outside the US (after Volkswagen) after it was officially formed 55 years ago, on May 13 1968. BLMC was created out of the merger between the Leyland Motor Corporation and British Motor Holdings, then the two largest wholly British car manufacturing groups in the UK.
The resultant industrial sprawl saw Austin, Morris, MG, Triumph, Rover, Jaguar, Land Rover, Riley, Wolseley, Vanden Plas and Daimler thrown together, along with an extensive assortment of truck, bus and engineering businesses. The indigestability of this merger, together with massive underfunding and nightmarish industrial unrest saw the business shrinking faster than a lake in an Australian drought.
But that didn’t stop some interesting machines from emerging, several of them legends, before the increasingly stained British Leyland (BL) name was eliminated, in 1986. Join me as we take a look at its best:
Slideshow story — click the right arrow above to continue
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Austin 1300 GT (1969)
‘The One GT That Just Had To Be’. So read the ads for the vinyl-roofed, fake alloy-wheeled, twin carburettor Austin 1300, which appeared seven years after the original hugely popular big Mini that was the Morris 1100, for many years the UK's top-selling car.
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Austin 1300 GT (1969)
This was more than the lifespan of the average car today, but five years before the 1100/1300 went out of production. Quite a hit despite the tackiness of its modish matt black add-ons, and much-prized today. Its 70bhp might not sound much today, but back then it qualified this car as a hot hatchback.
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Innocenti Mini Cooper 1300 (1972)
BL canned the Mini Cooper in 1971, but its Italian partners Innocenti continued to build Coopers until 1975, launching the 71hp Cooper 1300 in 1972.
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Innocenti Mini Cooper 1300 (1972)
Much better finished than the UK variety, it featured six-dial instruments, cloth trim, Rostyle wheels, opening quarterlights and many other detail improvements, selling well in Italy,
