1973-74 Leyland P76: The Scapegoat for a Rudderless Nation
12 May 2014
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By JoeKenwright
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This striking photo shows how right the profile as defined by a local designer was for Australia. It was so far ahead of its time that it could have provided the foundations for a benchmark Australian range for at least another decade. This side view also highlights how little US staff at British Leyland knew about the local market after demanding that the Aussies add fake length. Had the P76 survived, it was just as easily removed. (Photo from powerhouse.museum.com)
The loss of Australia’s car industry has many parallels with the loss of the P76 and may in fact be more closely connected than many realise. Since its June 1973 announcement and Leyland’s October 1974 local closure, the Leyland P76 has been a stone trapped in the national shoe. The P76 story is like an ongoing family dispute fanned by name-calling and blame as facts about the car itself have become irrelevant. Despite the efforts of those who know nothing about cars and still condemn it as a lemon, the Leyland P76 won’t go away.
Today’s industry closures can be traced directly back to Australia’s inability to deal with what was lost with the P76. To not look at the context of the P76’s demise would be doing former Leyland Australia staff and workers an injustice. The car as an end product was accurately and favourably assessed. This was comprehensively documented in the media when such things mattered: when it was new. Australians rushed to buy the P76 on release and as soon as word came through that Leyland was shutting its local facilities, there was another rush to buy what was left. The P76 reached an almost miraculous 17,000 total sales, a fraction of what it would have sold had Leyland been given a chance of meeting demand.
It was no coincidence that P76 buyers migrated to the upper level four headlight versions as the base model specification and light fleet colours tended to highlight the empty wheel arches and the hasty front and rear details. Despite the appealing time-warp simplicity of this example, improving the base level sedan to boost volume entry sales needed to be a much higher priority than a wagon or coupe. (Photo from globalcarbrands.com)
The P76 was surrounded by “anything but average” political and community behavior.
It was launched during an era of the unthinkable. Barely three years before the P76 arrived, Australians were jailing their youth for not wanting to be part of the Vietnam war. By 1973, just as many Australians were jeering those young Australians who believed they were acting in the nation’s interest by fighting and enduring this tough and cruel war at great personal cost.
Without reducing the experience of Australia’s Vietnam veterans to that of the workers and management of Leyland Australia, there are some disturbing parallels. The Vietnam veterans came home after losing an unsustainable war, the P76 was ridiculed and by association, its competent and hard-working creators devalued, after losing an unsustainable contest.
It remains significant in both cases that Australians attacked those who had the least say and suffered most in the final wash-up. Even worse, those who established the rules of engagement and joined the scapegoating that followed have not always faced the same scrutiny. There are parallels in today’s industry’s closures.
In both cases, the Australian efforts were dissipated, even undermined, by those calling the shots. In the Vietnam war, there were fundamental differences between the American and Australian way of doing things. There were even differences in why both nations were there in the first place.
The implosion of the British class and labour system occurring at the same time resonated so strongly with certain Australian politicians and unions that the fate of the P76 (along with the wider car industry and those whose livelihoods depended on it) appeared to be of little or no concern.
No matter how sympathetic you might be towards the plight of the P76, there was no excuse for the car to leave the factory looking like this from the rear. The tail treatment of the Force 7V coupe in front shows how easy it would have been to apply a VN Commodore-style rear that would have removed all the visual heaviness while leaving the huge boot intact. (Photo from globalcarbrands.com)
It is significant that Australia’s two northern lighthouses of political and cultural direction, Britain and the US, were both facing major internal strife. Australia had yet to formulate its own position on a wide range of issues to prevent it from being sucked into the vested interests undermining both nations.
At upper levels, especially this Targa Florio version, the P76 delivered an impressive work station for 1973-74 with an imposing but classy dash, superb pleated seats, integrated air-conditioning, flow-through ventilation and room to spare.
Australian politicians freely volunteered troops to Vietnam that were not asked for. Instead of protecting the P76 and what it brought to the nation, Australian politicians not only linked themselves to the unions and British class war which hastened its demise, in several notable cases, they added ammunition.
Rather than take another gratuitous look at the car, several new books and interviews including Gavin Farmer’s “Leyland P76 – anything but average” have revealed new aspects to the P76 story.
Note the second firewall that separated the engine room from the cabin and also defined a separate space for the heating and ventilation as well as a place to park the concealed wipers. Engine placement was close to ideal but the acreage of wasted space ahead of the radiator was imposed on the Australians to provide the illusion of extra size that wasn’t needed by 1973.
P76 Development
· After several attempts to improve British products for the Australian market, BLMC Australia, as it was known after May 1968, began an exhaustive study to narrow down the configuration for its first all Australian mainstream family car range. The ex-GM Rover V8 that came with the merger between BMC and Leyland had already been approved for Australian production by late 1968. Discussions were underway with Repco following its involvement with the Repco-Brabham racing version of the same engine.
· After a front drive Austin 1800 V8 had been built and rejected, rear drive benchmarks like the Peugeot 404 had convinced the company to focus its efforts on two new rear drive Australian family car entries in medium and larger sizes. Similar to what Holden had in mind for the HQ Holden and LH Torana, the new Leyland models would offer extra refinement and quality while sharing key parts, styling themes and production processes.
The P76 rear seat was cavernous for lanky Australian teenagers with enough boot space for the long trans-Australian road trips that defined Aussie family holidays.
· Because the coming British Marina program was so close to the parameters of the smaller Australian Leyland proposal, the Marina replaced it. As Ford found with the local Cortina and Holden with the later Commodore, this brought more dramas and long term costs than a new local design.
· The Marina also locked Leyland Australia into the E-series four and six cylinder engines which were neither suitable nor good enough for the local application as the original plans called for a small V6 version of the aluminium V8. Precious funds and factory resources that should have been allocated to the P76 at a critical stage were diverted to rectify yet another poor British design and upgrade these engines with limited success, neither of which had any long term prospects.
Local design consultant David Bentley highlighted how much was right about the P76 and how little it would have taken to address the existing styling. In reality, the styling was far less of a problem to sales than those intent on destroying P76 credibility but it was a convenient and highly visible scapegoat. (Wheels February 1975)
· Mindful that BMC had already carved out a consistent and steady niche for a more compact, better equipped alternative to the Big Three Holden, Falcon and Valiant, Leyland Australia decided to continue this positioning for the larger car. The original Australian P76 proposal was NOT for another local model based on the 1966 US Falcon’s 111in/2819mm wheelbase, 184.3in/4681mm length, 73.2 in/ 1,859 mm width and front and rear tracks of 58.0in/1473mm. These dimensions had already defined the 1968 Holden HK series and would define the local Valiant by 1971. Leyland’s Australian management believed from the outset that its traditional private buyers did not need a fourth variation of this formula and would welcome a slightly smaller, more sophisticated alternative. Yet these dimensions would play a critical role until the end.
· At a crucial point late in 1969, a former US Ford staffer who had moved to British Leyland had the power to insist that the P76 had to match the Big Three Australian cars in dimensions. The P76 therefore emerged 8 in/203.2mm longer than intended on a wheelbase that had been lengthened by an inch to the 1966 Falcon’s 111in/2819mm. This punched the P76 out to being the equal longest in class with the VH/VJ Valiant and wider than any of its rivals when there were signs (LC Torana) that not everyone needed such a big car.
· No longer able to set its own agenda as a compact alternative for private buyers, the P76 was now the biggest of its kind with three direct rivals competing for fleet sales. Leyland then had to demonstrate its extra size delivered extra capacity hence the oversized boot while maximising cabin space. This in turn dictated longer overhangs front and rear which the separate body additions at each end highlighted.
It took some conviction for Wheels staffers to stand up to the vested interests already evident in 1973 and name the P76 its 1973 Car of the Year, an award that the V8 version fully deserved. When Wheels excluded the six cylinder model from this title, it added credibility. The David Bentley renderings in fact showed how much was right about the P76, something that Australians already knew until the P76 was undermined from every direction. (Wheels February 1975)
· The extra size dictated the hasty local stretch of the Tasman/Kimberley’s E-series six from 2.2-litres to 2.6-litres with resulting reliability problems. Although an efficient 2.6-litre overhead cam six should have been a standalone P76 feature, its all cast iron construction and lack of a cross-flow head ensured it was little better than a comparable pushrod engine. The V8 was expanded from a proposed 4.2 to 4.4-litres. This made it a desirable engine choice for niche private buyers except the P76 was now competing for volume sales in a six cylinder fleet market against a bigger Holden 3.3-litre engine and new over 4.0-litre sixes in the Falcon and Valiant. Even so, the P76 2.6-litre was still more than adequate given the P76’s lighter body. By 1974, it was the perfect size for a more fuel-conscious market until the reliability issues created the impression that it was too small and failing under the strain.
· Because Leyland’s Sydney base had never needed the facilities to engineer a new platform from scratch, British sources confirm “much of the development of the P76 took place in the UK (over in Abingdon, mainly), and although a different area of BLMC would be responsible for chassis tuning and the like, Roy Brocklehurst of MG fame set-up the chassis in his last major assignment for the company.” For a brand new unitary structure, the P76 was outstandingly strong and light reflecting the experience of the team behind one of the world’s first and most enduring monocoque open cars, the MGB. In the absence of any clear proposals for the exterior, this new floorpan was hidden under several Holden bodies to allow extensive real road outback development to continue. However, this approach later dictated what could and couldn’t be done in a styling context.
Leyland Australian could have offered this Rover P8 fully-tooled ready for production two years earlier than the P76. Its dimensions were closer to what the Australians wanted and it shared the same drivetrain. Instead, the entire project hit the scrap heap on completion, allegedly because it was too close to Jaguar. (Photo from aronline.co.uk)
· It was bizarre that Rover, which was by now within Leyland, was developing its new P8 to almost identical dimensions in 1969. Leyland then dropped it when it was finished and tooled, way ahead of the P76. The question is often asked whether Rover P8 internal pressings became the P76’s internal structure but there is no evidence of that. The P8 shared the unusual construction of the Rover P6/Citroen DS19 which featured a free-standing monocoque structure clad with bolt-on panels. Either way, there was an abandoned Rover model, as least as good as the P76 and closer to what the Australians wanted in size, ready for production. It also had far more money spent on it and was built around the same drivetrain and could have easily been tweaked for local application.
· Even more bizarre was that the P76 wasn’t seen as a potential export replacement or a joint development of the Rover P8. As a result, the Australians were never given the opportunity or the extra funds to generate a larger Rover sedan that Rover desperately needed. This would also have solved the lack of identity that Leyland had as a car brand in Australia.
Rover was one of the few UK companies that had the in-house talent to design full-size family cars without outside help. For a 1970 release, the P8 was a stunner and Jaguar management had every reason to fear it hence the intense internal politicking to drop it. That it didn’t get handed over to Australia for local development and exports to non-Jaguar markets when it was already tooled was irresponsible all round and a massive waste of British money. (Photo from aronline.co.uk)