BIG AND BOLD
The P76 has earned an undeserved reputation as the car that killed Leyland Australia. However, today it is being reassessed in a better light as a small army of enthusiasts gradually re-educate the public about the car that was meant to save the company from oblivion, but never really stood a chance.
The story of Leyland Australia’s all-Australian car actually goes back to the beginnings of the Australian factory in 1948, as an assembly plant for CKD Morris cars in the inner-Sydney suburb of Waterloo. A major £12million expansion of the factory in 1957, under the recently-formed BMC Australia, enabled full manufacture, but the British-designed cars were not robust enough to meet local conditions, where most roads outside of the major cities were unsealed and often very rough.
Engineers at BMCA continually pushed to be allowed to design a car to meet Australia’s needs and take on the established models from Holden (GM), Ford and Chrysler in the lucrative family car market, but were only permitted to modify existing designs to better suit local roads. Early valiant attempts were the Morris Major Elite (effectively an Aussie version of the Wolseley 1500 with a locally-developed 1622cc engine) and the Austin Freeway (a local variant of the A60 Austin Cambridge with a 2433cc six-cylinder engine), but these had little impact on the competition.
A complete change in company philosophy to front-wheel-drive in the 1960s saw BMCA dominate the small car market, with the Mini and Morris 1100 being two of the top-selling small cars for most of the decade. The company recorded its best profits in the mid-1960s on the crest of this FWD wave, but this was still only a fraction of the family car market which was dominated by Holden. For example, in 1965 the
