HILLMAN IMP ALL WRONG, BUT ALL RIGHT.
You really couldn’t make it up – four years after Alec Issigonis and Alex Moulton delivered the Mini which convinced everyone that transverse, front-engined, front wheel drive was a game changer, the venerable Rootes Group introduced a small saloon that contrarily employed the opposite layout. It seems incomprehensible that a company building the ultra-conservative Hillmans and Sunbeams of middle England could pursue such a mad course of action, and then also open its new factory 300 miles from their traditional base. But of course, there was method behind the apparent madness.
Conventional wisdom leads you to the 1956 Suez crisis as the pivotal point for UK economy cars. With petrol in short supply, getting maximum mpg was suddenly high on the agenda. This encouraged the unconventional small-engined lightweights of bubble cars and fellow travellers, prompting the Rootes Group to add an economy car to their Minx and Rapier line-up. This is mainly true, but a year earlier Rootes already knew they needed something in the lucrative under 1000cc class that Ford, Austin and Morris were exploiting, so the Imp story really begins in 1955.
The fundamental question to the Imp story is, given the Rootes Group’s experience of conventional front-engined/ rear-wheel drive, why didn’t the designers pursue, say, the 1953 Austin A30 approach? This design and its heirs served Austin well for many years, pretty much achieving the design brief for the Imp. Some say that left to their own devices the Brits will always try to come up with something original. If that is true, such quests are noble, but not guaranteed to make money. It may be less interesting to finesse existing mousetraps, but successful manufacturers often do just that.
Instead, designers Michael Parkes at just 24 years old and Tim Fry at a mere 20 seemed to have been given carte blanche to create a small family saloon. Parkes’ own brief proposed carrying two adults and two children, returning 60mpg and 60mph, being rear-engined and fun
