PEAK PRACTICE

Driving a Three Thousand Five today seems like wilful defiance. Compared with other cars on today’s roads, the Rover looks, sounds and feels more substantial, somehow. The jarring juxtaposition between its gentle Englishness and those irate-looking supersized machines that surround it is a bit like spotting John Le Carré’s George Smiley in The Only Way Is Essex.

To make a fuss of this pioneer is alien to its quiet sensibilities, yet we must. Marques such as Citroën and Lancia have rightly enjoyed critical recognition for decades, but Rover? Despite being one of Britain’s great post-war innovators, instead the Solihull marque was debilitated by Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s BLMC disaster, panned by the press, dumped by BMW, written off by MG Rover and ridiculed by Alan Partridge.

So, when it comes to defining the marque at its best, why the Three Thousand Five (so named in the ads) or P6B (so designated internally)? This was Rover at its peak: a 1968 evolution of the ’63 original with only the subtlest of visual differences to announce its V8 with a claimed 161bhp (in reality, 144bhp as installed). And