Legend of the lemon
David Morley
Published: June 15, 2013 - 3:00AM
Forty years on: the full story of the Leyland P76.
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Advertisement In the world of race-based jokes, some people always use the Irish.
When it comes to sexist gags, did you hear the one about the blonde who … ?
And in the motoring milieu, barbecue comedians have always had the Leyland P76. Well, for the past four decades, anyway.
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But with the much-maligned P76 (or P38 - it was half the car it should have been, haw haw) celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, maybe it's time the whole story was told. All jokes aside.
- Leyland P76 from the inside
- Frequently unasked questions: Who were the car makers?
Was it as bad as many people believe? Or was it as good as thought by Wheels magazine, which made the P76 1973 Car of the Year?
Forty years is a long time for mists to gather, but it's an equally long time for the dust to settle. So what's the real story?
Going back to the beginning, the germ of the idea for the P76 came about in the same manner as that of most cars - an attempt to grab a slice of a lucrative market.
Leyland Australia, a subsidiary of British Leyland, had been looking at Holden, Ford and Valiant full-size sedans and station wagons, and thinking how nice it would be to have its own chunk of that market.
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Having correctly identified that a six-cylinder engine was an important part of the equation, early attempts involved Leyland taking the Austin 1800 and stretching it in most directions and fitting it with a transverse six-cylinder engine.
The results were the Austin Tasman and Kimberley, and while the concept had its merits, the ability to attract Aussie car buyers was not among them. There were also some serious quality and reliability issues with the Austin twins.
Clearly, the way forward for Leyland's big car was to stick with fairly conventional engineering. So the clean-sheet design used a wheelbase within a few millimetres of that used by everybody else in the segment, and mounted either an in-line six or V8 engine north-south with the gearbox directly behind it driving the rear wheels.
The six was an enlarged version of the Kimberley/Tasman unit and measured 2.6 litres, while the V8 was far more interesting and was a development of the even-then elderly 3.5-litre Rover V8 that powered (among many other things) the original Range Rover.
By the time Leyland Australia had finished with it, the all-alloy engine measured 4.4 litres and emerged all but unrecognisable as the Rover unit.
Power was reckoned to be 143kW and torque was a strong 386Nm. Both figures were almost certainly exaggerated, but nobody was telling the truth back then.
Despite predictions that the majority of buyers would opt for the cheap six-cylinder car, V8 sales made up about half of all P76s.
A choice of three- or four-speed manual transmission was offered with the car, as was a three-speed automatic.
In May 1973, it was all systems go, and Leyland Australia pushed the button to start production.
The P76 may have been a decent concept, but it was far from perfect in execution.
Like its British-based parent, Leyland Australia was having enormous difficulties nailing quality control at its Zetland plant in inner Sydney, and a unionised workforce was not helping either.
Beyond that, the car simply wasn't right from the moment it was launched. Even in those gentler times when a few hours at the side of the road with a recalcitrant car was hardly the rarity it is now, the P76 was seen as unresolved in quality terms.
The big complaints included loose-fitting doors that let in air - and, of course, dust - rear windows that fell out over bumps, and even an exhaust system design that routed the piping so close to the floor that the optional carpets began smouldering.
And then there was the styling. Leyland Australia had been forced to lobby the British parent company so hard for the go-ahead to do a big car there is speculation it then felt the need to make it truly huge to justify its optimism. The old saying that the boot was big enough to fit a 44-gallon drum is actually true, but why that should be seen as a requirement for success is still being debated.
Even by the standards of the time, the P76 is an awkward-looking product. And that's despite the design being the work of Michelotti of Turin, a design studio that, among other things, had designed the attractive Triumph 2500, the ground-breaking BMW 2002 and various Maseratis.
So how did a design put together by such a team of craftsmen turn out so ungainly?
Basically, the Michelotti design was fiddled with by the Leyland Australia staff (perhaps on the instructions of their British masters), who changed bits and pieces and demanded other parameters that completely diluted the purity of the original.
Which begs the question: what was right with the P76?
Quite a bit, actually.
For a start, it nailed its family-car brief by being huge inside. There was plenty of headroom even in the back seat, and the wide proportions made for lots of elbow and shoulder room. With the standard bench-style front seat, the P76 was truly a six-seater.
There was also exceptional vision to all sides, and only the high tail obscured the rear view for shorter drivers.
And that boot we mentioned? Thanks to the 44-gallon drum thing, it was simply vast and featured a low-loading lip and wide opening. The body was clever too, and despite the poor panel fit, the P76's body was made up of only slightly more than 200 individual parts (claimed to be only five more than a Mini). This simplified production and made for a stronger body shell.
The car drove well, with good brakes and positive steering. In fact, the driving experience was roundly praised by contemporary road testers who compared it favourably to the establishment cars.
Fuel economy was better than that of the established players, and the general view was that once Leyland got the build-quality issues sorted out, the P76s would fly out the door.
Of course, that never happened, because just 16 months later, in October 1974, the P76 project imploded, taking most of the Zetland plant with it.
So what went wrong?
You could argue that the assembly glitches were never fixed, but that would be to forget that the market, and Leyland itself, never gave the plant time to get its act together.
There was also speculation that Leyland in Britain was experiencing financial woes and could not fully fund the development of a project half a world away.
Against that background came strikes in the Leyland factory as well as in the supplier companies, and there was a steel shortage at one point. And let's not forget the world fuel crisis arrived just as the P76 hit the dealerships.
There was political fallout, too. The federal Industries Assistance Commission reckoned there was room for three car makers in Australia, not four. And hot on the heels of the P76's demise, then PM Gough Whitlam referred to it as ''a dud'' and Bill Hayden famously called it a lemon.
Makes you wonder what chance it ever had.
Despite the praise heaped on the car by the motoring magazines of the day, the car-buying public never really warmed to it.
In fact, the wisecracks had started to emerge from the minute the first P76 was used in the rain and the poorly aligned doors let in the water.
Somewhat ironically, the car was seen as less Australian than the US-parented Holdens and Fords that held sway at the time. The reality was that the P76 probably had more local content than any of the other cars, apart from the Valiant, which was a 100 per cent local product.
But the P76's legacy lives on.
That fabulous V8 engine is still used everywhere from ski boats to race cars and is still revered for its combination of light weight, performance and tuneability.
Like the Pacific Highway leaving Queensland, the V8 engine is still regarded as the best thing to come out of the P76 story.
Hey, I thought we said there would be no cheap jokes.
Cover image courtesy of The BMC Experience magazine, the only magazine dedicated to all BMC and Leyland cars, bmcexperience.com.au
A dependable member of the family
Finding somebody who bought a P76 brand new and still owns it is a tough task in 2013. But Melbourne-based Ed Kosmider is the next best thing.
Kosmider bought his P76 in 1974 when it was just a year old.
And to confound the critics, he has never even thought about getting rid of it.
In 1974, he was driving an XR Falcon but decided his growing family needed a second car. His brother had bought a P76 and, after a couple of drives in it, Kosmider knew he wanted one.
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''The thing is,'' Kosmider says, ''it's now outlived about six of my other family cars.''
As well as experience of his brother's car, Kosmider's priorities in 1974 were pretty simple. ''I needed something reliable and something I could work on myself,'' he says. ''And it was cheap.''
And has his car lived up to its awful reputation, or has it been reliable? ''Reliable? It's been nothing but,'' he says, laughing. ''I really don't understand its poor reputation. I've had to rebuild the transmission once and a head gasket went about 15 years ago, but I fixed that easily.''
The car, a V8 automatic, is on its third trip around the odometer, and while it's definitely not new, Kosmider says it still works just fine.
''It's home serviced and I get my spare parts from Kmart.''
And what do his friends and family think of the car?
''When my son was about 15, he was at me to sell it. He was embarrassed to be seen in a P76, I think. But now, my grandson helps me wash it. He thinks it's the Wiggles' big red car.''
Leyland P76 from the inside
Wil Hagon helped launch the P76 in 1973 and recalls the story of its rise and fall.
Ah, the infamous Leyland P76, the car that everyone thinks they know about but which far fewer have driven. Because it’s been put in the ‘crook cars’ basket and become popular for cheap laughs, its good points are long forgotten.
Uncertainty about the company's future probably cut it down as much, if not more, than the car itself.
In my latter days of nearly four years in PR at BLMC (later Leyland Australia) it came to me to organise the release of the P76 to the motoring press and, thereby, the public.
Like now with VF Commodore, Leyland’s future depended on P76 being well accepted and selling strongly, although, even if it did, revenues from it would not have brought in much money. Gross profit on the base, taxi/fleet model was $40. On the top-of-the-line V8, it was just $200. Then, as now, it needed more than the Australian market for it to succeed.
I was pleased, when our fleet of press cars were registered, to discover that we’d been in time at the NSW RTA to have GKH prefix on our number plates rather than the GMH prefix that wasn’t far away.
The in-line six cylinder single overhead cam engine, which had, in smaller capacity, been in the front-wheel-drive Tasmans and Kimberleys, was just adequate. Its 2.6-litre engine was smaller than both the Ford and Holden family car engines, so had less power and torque. A willing gearbox and lots of revs were its best friends.
But the V8 was very different. It was derived from GM’s BOP (Buick Oldsmobile Pontiac) alloy engines. Rover used the original 3.5 litre capacity successfully for several vehicles, while Jack Brabham and Repco used the Buick block as the base for the in 3l F1 Repco engines in the 1965-6 Brabhams. They won two drivers and two constructors world championships. There was also a Traco Oldsmobile race engine, so its lineage was outstanding!
So the V8 engine was not only good, it was several decades before Ford and Holden caught up. Despite its 4.4 litres, it was lighter than the four cylinder B-series BMC engine in the Austin 1800!
The P76 V8 went hard and handled well. It had more power than its rivals and much better weight distribution. The hardest-driving of the then small number of motoring journalists was a professional rally and sometime race driver John Keran. He loved the P76 handling, getting massive oversteer slides from it in his testing on dirt, just like a thoroughbred rally car. He thought it outstanding.
Because of its sure-footed handling, for many years P76s, including long after its demise, were popular tow vehicles for race cars.
To suggest that P76 was without merit is ignorant. It also suggests that those who, mostly, cast favourable judgement on it at the time didn’t know what they were talking about. It had its faults but, as with other Australian cars on which some derive great pleasure from tipping large buckets of bile, it was good opposition to its rivals and better in some ways. And, as is still the case in this country, it was done for a fraction of the budget needed in most other markets.
Its V8 engine, its handling and some aspects of its design, such as the wipers below the bonnet line, were many years ahead of the Holdens and Fords of the time. They had money that Leyland could only dream of. I remember an engineer saying that Ford or Holden would have refined the instrument and door handle design and cut $100 from it. “But we only had time to do the initial design.”
If only the parent company in England had not been going down, its Australian arm might, with more time and budget, have turned P76 into a winner, although it might have needed a different badge on it for it to be accepted.
Wil Hagon
This story was found at:
http://www.smh.com.au/drive/motor-news/ ... 2o7nf.html
GKW
