I first got to know about Leyland’s P76 when my wife Sue and I lived in Australia from 1986-1988. I was training as a commercial pilot and we needed an inexpensive car because we didn’t have much of a budget. Looking at what was available, we found things like Ford Falcons and Holden Kingswoods, but they were all quite tatty for the kind of money we had. Then we found a car that we’d never even heard of – a Lneyland P76.
It turned out that the P76 was a model many Aussies treated with disdain, and that helped to keep prices low. The one we found for sale was green and had a V8 engine – I quite liked the idea of a V8 as I’d never had one before. The thought of petrol consumption didn’t even occur to me, but then again petrol in Australia was not very expensive back then. We were in a place called Ballarat, which is a large inland town, living on the airport where I was training so it didn’t matter that this was not exactly a city car. We paid AUS$1900 for the P76, and with the exchange rate at the time that
