A Rover lost in the sands of time

There must have been innumerable motorsport projects that were well under way before chassis, engines and whatever were destroyed long before making it onto the race track or rally stage. Or, in the case of this interesting tale, the desert.

Austin Rover had a Paris-dakar Rally car on the stocks over the winter of 1986-87 based on, of all things, a Rover 800. The project had started life as a feasibility study for the stillborn Group S category, which ended up as collateral damage when Group B was axed three days after Lancia superstar Henri Toivonen and co-driver Sergio Cresto lost their lives on the Tour de Corse in May ’86.

Austin Rover Motorsport boss John Davenport came up with a plan to follow Peugeot’s lead by switching from the World Rally Championship to the rally-raid arena. The seven-eighths scale rear-engined Rover 800 silhouette car would become an off-road special.

Bernie Marcus, who led the design on the project, remembers a car that was to be powered by the Austin Rover 6R4 V6 (right) getting a long way down the line.

“There was definitely a chassis and work was under way on the body at a place in Bicester,” he recalls. “We were working with Xtrac, I think, on a new transmission and Bilstein on the suspension.

“The plan was to do the Paris-dakar in 1988 and some events like the Pharaohs Rally beforehand. Tony Pond was going to be one of the drivers.”

The project came to a shuddering halt when Davenport suddenly left Austin Rover at the end of March 1987 at the beginning of the sorry tale that resulted in his incarceration. New management moved in and the Austin Rover competitions department was reduced to little more than a stores department for 6R4s and Metro Challenge cars.

Marcus had left by the time the curtain came down in mid-1987, but he learned that everything to do with the 800 Dakar car was destroyed. “I know they collected the chassis from the composites place and crushed it,” he says. “It all got destroyed.”