STANDARD FARE
Challenge someone to pick an engine which sums up the complex history of the British Leyland saga and the chances are their first choice will be the A-Series, the Austin design which will forever be identified with iconic classics from A35 to Mini to Midget.
There was however another powerplant in the BMC/BL parts bin which proved similarly versatile and at first glance seems so similar to the Austin engine that it elicits another sigh at the craziness of the whole BL saga: the Standard ‘SC’ engine.
The ‘SC’ tag gives a clue as to the age of the design, which was initiated by legendary Standard boss Sir John Black when he realised that Standard was facing increased competition in the immediate postwar market from the likes of Ford and Austin. At the time Standard’s sole model was the bulky Vanguard and it was obvious that buyers were increasingly looking for smaller cars – hence the ‘Small car’ project name.
This would eventually generate the no-frills Standard Eight, a car so basic that it lacked even an opening bootlid and which needed an engine similarly cheap to produce. At the time the only powerplant in the Standard range was the old wet-liner engine as used in the Vanguard and TR2, but this tractor-derived design was bulky and costly to manufacture.
A smaller, more basic design was the solution and the directive that it should be built on the tooling of
