BMC/BL Rally

Rover 200 pioneer joins BMC and BL classics at a blisteringly hot BMC/BL event

Fans of BMC and BL classics reckoned this event’s 25th anniversary outing was one of the best yet with more than 300 British cars packing into Peterborough’s Ferry Meadows park.

The event featured many cars once seen everywhere, such as a Morris Ital in Snapdragon Yellow and a brace of matching Austin A60 Cambridges in a porridge hue which, unless everyone was mistaken, was Cumulus Grey.

Beige was much in evidence, and you could stick your head through the window of some exhibits to savour the smell of boiling hot vinyl from seats that would have removed skin from the back of the legs of anyone wearing short trousers sitting on them after exiting a Little Chef, circa 1974.

Cars from the Austin Rover and MG Rover eras were well represented with, among other vehicles, an excellent display from the Rover 200 & 400 Owners’ Club.

These included the first R8 Rover 200 to leave the production line, the car having originally been in the Heritage Motor Centre’s collection before being auctioned off and, after covering more than 60k miles narrowly missing the scrapyard. It now belongs to John Howson, who also owns a Rover-built ‘cutaway’ R8 made for educational purposes.

Sarah Nye, event secretary, said: ‘It’s been a brilliant celebration for our 25th – and we even ordered the weather specially!’

The one-day event at Ferry Meadows brought together 300 home-grown classics, with this 1973 MG Midget, 1977 Triumph TR7 and 1975 Austin Allegro basking in the August sunshine. Richard Ashby’s father had one of the desireable 1978 Morris Marina LEs. It looked the same as this one, which Richard has owned for 10 years and had professionally restored. One of the show displays that particularly impressed our Nick was this gathering of Austin-based