DAVID SADDINGTON
Now retired from a senior design role at JLR, it’s the humble Rover R3 that remains favourite for one of the UK’S car design visionaries
Q Being a car designer is many a youngster’s dream, but how did it all start for you?
‘As a child it was always about cars. From a very early age, I wouldn’t go to sleep until my parents had drawn me a car to colour in the following morning. I was obsessive about it, and would wake up and colour the car in before breakfast every day. As I got older, I started to draw them myself, but even then, it never occurred to me that I’d make a career out of it. When I left school, I wasn’t sure of my career plan, but the Industrial Design course at Lanchester Polytechnic (now Coventry University) appealed, so I did that.
My break in the car industry came with a junior role at the Peugeot-talbot team at Whitley, but this was short-lived as the decision came to rationalise the UK operations and kill off the Talbot brand. Luckily, I’d done enough for my CV to appeal to Austin-rover, so I joined there in 1984.’
Q What were your roles at Austin-rover?
‘The first project I worked on in any depth was AR6, which was planned to be the replacement for the Metro. I had quite a bit of creative input into it under the tutelage of Roy Axe, who had done an incredible job of changing the company’s approach to design. Prior to Roy, British Leyland was a company that started with a car and added a design. But he brought in a new approach that turned that around. That and working with Honda completely transformed the atmosphere in the company and led to some real successes such as the Rover ‘R8’ 200 that was a truly joint Honda-rover collaboration.
The downside to R8 was that it killed AR6, which was soul-destroying for those of use who’d worked on it. We had developed a small car that was ready for the Nineties, but the money wasn’t there, so instead the R6 – essentially a Metro with a K-series engine – was brought in as a hastily conceived gap-filler that lasted far longer than it should have.’
Q How did you feel about this at the time?
‘I was in a very difficult place both professionally and mentally. I was still a relatively young guy and I could see other car designers around me having breakthrough moments all over the place, such as my good friend Richard Woolley (designer of the Rover 600 and 75).
It was a crisis of confidence. I wondered if I just wasn’t good enough. As a designer, you want to have a design that is your own, that’s something you will always own and look at and say: “I did that”. I didn’t even have a wheel trim to my name because AR6, into which I’d dedicated so much effort, became a cancelled programme. And R8, which was getting all the praise, was a combined Anglojapanese project I hadn’t really been involved with.’
Q So, what happened next?
‘Luckily, I didn’t work on R6. To refresh the Metro when you knew what it could have been would have been a tough challenge. Instead, the team I was in was asked to look at the R6’s replacement, scheduled for launch in late 1994. It was a small car, but slightly bigger than the Metro and minus the packaging constraints of Hydragas suspension. We were told it had to be based on a shortened R8 platform and use the same bulkhead, but for cost reasons would require a simpler rear end with a torsion beam replacing the R8’s multi-link set-up. The decision was taken to use a load of Maestro parts, but that was Engineering’s problem. For Design, it wasn’t bad news, as it meant we had a freer rein to come up with rear end styling concepts and keep the length down to around four metres, as was our diktat.
It would have been 1992, I think, when our designs were presented to internal management over at Canley. A number of sketches and scale models would be shown and a final design selected. I’d been working closely with my design colleagues Julian Quincey and Oliver Le Grice, whose sketches were really captivating. We weren’t allowed to go to the meeting though and I remember going home that evening on a knife-edge. The following day would either be a career-defining moment or a devastating blow. Luckily, I didn’t have to wait – the Chief Project Engineer called me at home that evening to tell
‘Designed as a small car, then marketed as a medium sized one’
me our design had been chosen. I was in tears of either joy or relief when I put the phone down.’
Q How did R3 evolve?
‘SK3, as it was first known, came along very quickly after that. We had a bit of toing and froing around the overall length as every time it snuck over four-metres we were told to make it smaller – somewhat ironic when you consider that it was designed as a small car but ended up being marketed as a medium-sized one after the Honda relationship collapsed (and it became R3). But we didn’t know that at the time. The Rover ‘100’ as it was conceived was a bigger alternative to a Metro. The biggest challenge we faced as a styling team was the front end – the R8 had quite a long front overhang and the fact we needed to use its platform meant that a lot of design concepts had a very long front and a very short rear. They looked awkward. We spent a lot of time looking at the models in plan view – that is from twodimensional angles – and spotting the areas that looked awkward. R3 was one of the first designs to therefore use a common feature in today’s car design, with a tapered nose and headlamps that wrap around into the side of the body to disguise the length of the nose. It is one of the features of the car I’m most proud of.’
Q What about the BMW takeover, and how did that affect you?
‘It sent shockwaves through the company, but to look at it selfishly I worked as a designer, and in car industry terms, which was the company you’d have most wanted to be associated with in 1994?
BMW or Honda?
I loved BMW styling of that era – I still do, in fact. The 3 and 5-Series were such pretty cars. So, for our team there was a lot of excitement, as there was in some areas of engineering. I’m not sure the manufacturing teams over at Longbridge were that impressed, mind. It did create a massive headache for us, though. With Honda out of the picture the HH-R (400) became needfully more expensive and couldn’t really be sold as a credible Escort or Astra rival, so the R3 was repositioned as a larger car and our brief was to therefore make it feel special enough for its design, quality and road manners to compensate for the smaller footprint and passenger space. I think I speak for the whole team in saying we couldn’t have done much better.’
Q How did you feel when you saw R3 on the road for the very first time?
‘I remember driving home from work one night and seeing my first R3 that wasn’t a company car, but which somebody had gone into a showroom and bought. It wasn’t the best colour and it was a low specification, but it looked amazing. I was so proud.
That feeling hasn’t left me. I still get that sense of pride even if I see one clinging on to life with rotten sills and the exhaust held up by twine, especially if there’s a young person driving it and getting their first taste of car ownership from something that I designed. Indeed, the reason my tea’s going cold is because I’ve just spent 10 minutes in the car park looking at the two cars you brought along!’
Q What happened after R3, and why is it your defining moment?
‘I went on to do many exciting things. I was Studio Director for the MINI while it was still part of Rover Group through to its launch and I even missed the launch of R3 at the Earl’s Court Motorfair as I had to go to a planning decision meeting at Gaydon on the same day, where the final MINI design would be chosen. I then went on to work for Land Rover and led the design of the Discovery 3, which was a bold move in a new direction for them. Then Evoque, and several other JLR projects. All were exciting, rewarding and amazing to be involved with.
But none had the same magic.
The Rover 200 might be a modest little car in the eyes of many, but for me it was a design that not only put my career on the map, but importantly gave me a massive sense of self-worth mixed in with the kind of teamwork I’ve never experienced before or since. We achieved so much against so many challenging odds, and biased as I am, I still think it looks great today. It’s the car that I’m most proud of, for sure.’