Austin Maestro
Any Maestro is a rare thing these days, especially one in entry level trim. But a genuine ex-police Maestro? That takes rarity to new levels.
Ultra rare on two counts – it is a base model, and an ex-police Panda car.
It could almost be a scene from Wycliffe, Spender or any other 1990s police drama now haunting daytime television. The grim-faced leading man would arrive by Vauxhall Senator or Rover 827 to investigate an outbreak of skulduggery in the middle of Longbridge, while in the background would be the uniformed extras in their Maestro. Such patrol cars had pretensions to neither speed nor glamour, but they provided hardworking and reliable transport for many constabularies. Today, Anthony Ellis is the proud owner of the example pictured here, thought to be the only surviving police Maestro in the UK.
Many readers will no doubt recall the interest provoked by the new BL product that promised ‘Driving is Believing’ back in March 1983. The Maestro soon became the country’s sixth best-selling car, but as Keith Adams notes on his indispensable website Aronline ( by 1989 it ranked only nineteenth. The Rover Group’s marketing emphasis was now on the new R8-series 200 which debuted in the autumn of that year, while the older car’s line-up was to be drastically reduced. The Maestro was only six years old, but its lines harked back to the late 1970s and the car once sold under the slogan ‘High Tech; Not So High Price’ was regarded by late-period yuppies as utterly unfashionable.
However, throughout the early 1990s, the likes of a 1.3 Clubman continued to offer the nation’s fleet managers dependable transport at a low cost. Lancashire Constabulary took delivery of J844 KHG on the 28th October 1991, and the price was a very reasonable £7158.70. Anthony is still researching its history, including the date of its demob, and he thinks that as far as is known, the Maestro was used on general Panda car duties and was assigned to the Fleetwood and Chorley districts.
As with so many once ubiquitous 1980s and 1990s cars, the Maestro began to disappear from the roads by the early 2000s. Anthony came by his example in 2014 after he read an advertisement on the Maestro and Montego Owners’ Club Forum that asked: ‘Anyone interested in a police car project?’ The Clubman had been dry stored since 2003 and Anthony saw a number of pictures of the car before deciding to go for it.
The Maestro also came with some spares, and in terms of rust Anthony says: ‘It was not bad at all to be honest, just the rear panel and the rear driver's arch and petrol enclosure were suffering.' The eventual restoration process still took three years, though.
The first stage was to dismantle the bodyshell, followed by welding. A respray represented a milestone, and there then ensued five to six hours of work every night over an eight week period, all carried out after Anthiny had completed his shift as a recovery driver.
Anthony pays tribute to the help he received on the Maestro project, saying: ‘Simon, an HGV technician, helped from start to finish
An ad on the M MO C forum asked: 'Anyone interested in a police car project?'