The Ferrari That Britain Built By Accident
On the morning of 30 June 1976, Rover launched the most important car in its history. By lunchtime, the plant building it was closed by a strike.
The dispute was about a raffle. Management had offered to give five of the new cars away to assembly workers who hit their targets. The non-assembly workers objected that this was unfair, and walked out. A Transport Workers Union official described the raffle as ludicrous and divisive. The car that had just been unveiled, and would within six months be voted European Car of the Year, sat outside the locked gates in turmeric yellow paint that was already preparing to fall off.
This was the Rover SD1, and the story of what happened to it over the following decade is one of the great industrial tragedies of the twentieth century, though you have to have a particular sense of humour to find it funny.
The Shape
The SD1 was drawn by a German-born Englishman called David Bache, who had been Rover's chief stylist since 1954. He had spent his career quietly pushing a conservative company towards cars that had opinions. When the Rover MD Maurice Wilks had first seen one of his designs in the 1950s, he had rejected it with a line that deserves a plaque in the Science Museum. "It's a head turner. The Rover Company don't make head-turners. We like to make vehicles which pass unobtrusively and are not noticed."
By the early 1970s, Wilks was gone, British Leyland had swallowed Rover, and Bache was free to turn heads. He presented the BL board with a low, long, wedge-shaped fastback that looked so uncannily like a Ferrari Daytona that people would shortly start calling it the poor man's Ferrari. Bache cheerfully admitted he had been looking at a Daytona while he drew it. The board chose it in February 1971. The project was named SD1, standing for Specialist Division 1, which is the sort of name a committee gives a car when it has no marketing imagination left.
The shape still looks right fifty-five years later. Four feet four inches high, with a flat bonnet, a steeply raked windscreen, and a fastback tail that made the Mercedes and BMWs of the period look like filing cabinets on castors. Inside, the dashboard was a pod that sat on top of the fascia, designed that way so the same moulding could be flipped for left or right-hand drive, saving BL a fortune. The air vent doubled as a passage for the steering column. Nobody else in Europe was attempting engineering that elegant.
Under the bonnet was a 3.5-litre aluminium V8 that Rover had bought wholesale from General Motors in the 1960s, when Detroit had decided aluminium engines were too complicated. It gave the car 155 brake horsepower and a genuine 125 miles per hour at a time when most executive cars were still short of the ton. Because of internal BL politics, the 3500 was priced too low in order that it didn't embarrass the XJ6 of sister company Jaguar. For under five thousand pounds, you could drive home something that out-looked, out-cornered and nearly out-ran cars costing twice as much.
The Build
The assembly hall built to produce it was a thirty-million-pound government-funded extension to Rover's Solihull plant, and the target was 140,000 cars a year. The peak was 55,000, achieved once, in 1978.
The launch-day raffle strike was the beginning. In February 1977, stoppages at the Castle Bromwich body plant halted SD1 output entirely. The moment that was resolved, a BL-wide toolmakers' walkout closed Solihull for another month, finishing just as the SD1 was going on sale across Europe. Dealers in Geneva and Frankfurt had European Car of the Year badges and no machines to put them on. Workers at Solihull then rejected the introduction of a night shift to meet demand, on the grounds that night work disrupted family life and affected eyesight. They circulated a pamphlet about it. That October, fifty-seven axle assemblers at Triumph's Radford factory stopped work for six weeks, stopping the Rover line with them.
There was, during this period, a dispute at Solihull in which six quality inspectors walked out over being issued brown uniforms rather than white ones. Finished Rovers accumulated on the line, unable to be signed off, because the men authorised to say they were satisfactory were sitting in a hut objecting to the colour of their overalls.
The cars that did escape were not always finished in the traditional sense. The paint came off. Trim fell loose. Electrics caught fire, or failed to catch fire when asked. Carpets disintegrated. Sunroofs rained on the occupants. A journalist at one of the weekly magazines reviewed the same press-fleet 3500 at six months and at a year, and noted it had become visibly worse in the interim. Castle Bromwich was producing bodies that needed rectification the moment they arrived at Solihull, and Solihull, having its own troubles, did not always rectify them.
By 1980, the situation had reversed itself with beautiful completeness. BL now had a stockpile of ten thousand unsold Rovers, and was closing the line for four weeks at a time to work through them. The assembly hall had gone, in four years, from unable to meet demand to unable to create any.
The Rescue That Wasn't
The SD1 had two great admirers during this period, and both of them were in uniform. The first was the British police, who adopted the 3500 in enormous numbers because it was fast, roomy, and the V8 could sustain a three-figure chase from Birmingham to the Scottish border. The second was Gordon Jackson, who drove a turmeric yellow 3500 around London in The Professionals and convinced an entire generation of British schoolboys that a yellow SD1 was the natural ride of powerful men with secret clearances.
Neither audience helped. The police forces who had bought fleets of the things found that a patrol Rover in the workshop was doing the opposite of its intended job, and many of them quietly went back to Ford Granadas. West Midlands Police, whose area of operations covered Rover's Castle Bromwich, Longbridge and Solihull factories, had the dubious honour of being the first force in Britain to put an SD1 into service. The cars were literally being chased by themselves.
Meanwhile on the racetrack, a Scottish former farmer called Tom Walkinshaw had begun turning Vitesse models, the fuel-injected 190 brake horsepower version that appeared in 1982, into serious racing machinery. In 1983, TWR won all eleven rounds of the British Saloon Car Championship. Then BMW lodged a protest, and six months later a Tribunal of Enquiry chaired by Lord Hartley Shawcross, who had been the lead British prosecutor at Nuremberg, was required to rule on whether Walkinshaw had installed his tappets correctly. He concluded that Walkinshaw had not. The title was stripped. A driver called Andy Rouse, who had spent the season pottering around in a borrowed Alfa Romeo, was handed a championship he had not known he was fighting for. The following year he won it properly in a privateer Vitesse.
None of this helped either. Racing success makes people buy cars only when the cars in the showroom can be trusted to start on Tuesday mornings.
The End
By 1981 BL had run out of patience. Chairman Michael Edwardes closed the Solihull operation that had been built at such expense five years earlier. Two thousand jobs went. SD1 assembly was moved to Cowley, where the Series 2 cars that appeared in 1982 were significantly better made. The paint, occasionally, stayed on.
It made no difference. British buyers who could afford an executive saloon had spent six years watching the SD1 be mocked in letters pages, and had quietly shifted their allegiance to Munich and Stuttgart, where the cars worked. The Germans, who had started the 1970s as perfectly respectable but slightly dull manufacturers of executive saloons, finished the decade as the unchallenged masters of the segment, in large part because Britain had handed them the market as a going concern. The SD1 limped on until 1986, when it was replaced by the Rover 800, a Honda Legend in a Savile Row suit. Nobody ever called the 800 the poor man's anything.
The Rover V8 under the bonnet went on to power Land Rover products for another seventeen years. The hall that was mothballed in 1981 eventually reopened in 1997 to build Freelanders, and is still there today producing Jaguars under Indian ownership. The talent was in the building all along. The design was in the building. The engineering was in the building. What was not in the building was the willingness, on any side, to point in the same direction for more than about six weeks at a time.
You still see them occasionally, the survivors, turmeric yellow in the slow lane of the M5 with somebody's grandfather at the wheel. He looks rather pleased with himself. He is right to be.