SOLIHULL’S SLEEPER
To celebrate 50 years of the Rover P5B, John Simister goes back to the factory for a visit
Exactly half a decade ago, the company whose headquarters formed the backdrop to the quartet of Rovers you see arrayed here ceased to be a separate, independent entity. The Rover Company Ltd of Solihull, Warwickshire, complete with the Alvis company that Rover had bought in 1965, agreed to an amicable takeover by Leyland Motors on December 11, 1966 to take effect during 1967. And that started a movement of chess pieces around the board that didn’t stop until 2008.
That’s not the only anniversary we’re marking here, because this year also marks the half-century of the Rover P5B, the first Solihull production car with a V8 engine. That was then. This is now, and parked just out of our shot is a new Jaguar F-pace. Behind the photographer are Land Rovers, Range Rovers and other Jaguars, including XES that, like the F-pace and of course the regular Range Rover and its racy Sport sibling, are made at Solihull, as Range Rovers have been since 1969. But Rovers with the P4, P5 and P6 codenames have tended to be written out of the script of today’s thriving Jaguar Land Rover company.
Not today, though. They’re back, and they’re parked in the directors’ parking spaces right outside the office doors. So, what’s been going on? Jaguars at Solihull? Rover sidelined by history? How did that happen? Such are the intersecting circles of the companies that once piled up to make the giant British Leyland edifice, then fell out of it brick by
brick. The Rover name became tainted in later years thanks to association with British Leyland’s woes, Rover’s post-bl Hondafication, its cheapening when it replaced Austin as the mass-market brand name on Metros and sunk into a confused fug, and by its eventual disintegration and bankruptcy in 2005 after the divorce from the BMW connection. The Rover name isn’t much use today unless prefixed by Land. But at Solihull, the cars of Rover’s happier past are still remembered.
We’re going to Gaydon
My mind is full of Rover’s turbulent history, and how it was pitched from being a calm company full of innovative engineers to being a small cog in a massive industrial machine riven by strife, as I set off for Solihull in my pre-leyland Rover 2000. It’s a 1965 car that represents Rover at one of the most forward-thinking times in its independent existence, the year when it entered Le Mans for the second time with a Rover-brm gas turbine car.
This 2000 is the P6 in its purest form, almost exactly as launched in 1963. So it’s unadorned with extraneous trim, unsightly bulges and bits of blackness, and its pace is slowed when required by original Dunlop disc brakes. This is stylist David Bache’s vision of minimalist luxury and ideal ergonomics perfectly realised. Few modern cars can match the Rover’s ability to smooth away bumps, and it’s lively enough to mix with modern traffic even as I point it onto the M40 and its cast of commuters on a mission.
The plan is to meet at the newly-named, refurbished and expanded British Motor Museum at Gaydon, where we’ll meet up with Rover historian and author James Taylor and P5 fanatic Geoff Arthur. James’ Rover is a 75, but not the Nineties version. It’s a 1950 P4 in black, from a time when the Rover company had just a two-model range, the other being the Land Rover.
It’s hard to imagine it now, but this 75 – the second Rover so named, based on the bhp of the engine that it shared with its trad-looking P3 predecessor – was seen as shockingly showy, brash even, by staid Rover loyalists at its 1949 introduction. Its full-width body shape was inspired by a Studebaker, and the horizontally-slatted front grille with its central foglight soon earned it the ‘Cyclops’ nickname. Many people think the light, too, was Studebaker-inspired, but in fact the US company adopted that feature after Rover.
In late 1952, the 75 lost its striking Cyclops grille in favour of a simpler one with vertical slats, recalling the traditional Rover radiator. In 1954, by which the time the 75 had been joined by a four-cylinder, Land Rover-engined 60 and a more powerful 90 model, Rover’s new designer David Bache squared off the tail a bit and greatly enlarged the rear window for improved rearward visibility. Two years after that he designed a sharper, squarer front end to match, and another power increase signalled the arrival of the 105 model.