In 1963, the choice was simple. You either drove a Riley 4/72 or a Rover P5 if you wanted to show you’d made it. If you couldn’t afford the big Rover or Humber equivalent, the upper echelons of the family saloon were the solution. But Rover’s engineers begged to differ. They identified the market in between as being ripe to target with a new 2.0-litre class of executive sports saloon. Britain had come to see the Rover P4 as staid, but it was ahead of its time when launched, and the new car would follow that formula perfectly.
Early plans to fit the new car with hydropneumatic suspension and a gas turbine power unit were abandoned, but its base unit with unstressed panels mirrored the Citroën DS in its concept. A new engine was developed from scratch following the abandonment of the turbine programme – an overhead cam unit of 1973cc, which would be fitted with a single carburettor in the first examples, launched as the Rover 2000. David Bache had penned a simple
