Remembering Metro mania

You move off to a symphony of gears-in-the-sump whine, the Hydragas suspension less absorbent than you might hope for from a system of such theoretical sophistication, to enjoy the friendly urgings of the A series.

But it is not fast. Still, neither were its rivals, which were suddenly faced with a hot-seller. From the October 1980 launch Metro sales achieved a rate of climb BL hadn’t enjoyed since it launched 1976’s fabulous-but-flawed Rover SD1. But rather than knocking its competitors flat, the Metro boosted sales of all of them.

But why all the interest?

Well, if you or your parents are more than 52 years old, you or they paid for this car with tax. British Leyland was nationalised back then, a big, troubled employer riven with Red Robbo industrial relations strife while struggling to find the investment cash and engineering capability to produce a competitive car. So the whole country had an interest. More than that – though it seems hard to believe today – the Metro was eventually supposed to replace the Mini, which was a legend even in the ‘70s, rough ride, poor finish, noisiness or not.

Its successor would be the obsession of spy photographers across the land, who would chase any Longbridge-based, disguise-clad prototype for miles.

And we manage our miles to Gaydon, where on a table in the bowels of the Heritage Centre Harris Mann spills the contents of his sizeable portfolio.

We see an original, much better sketch for the Allegro. Photographs of the full-size clay for the Princess, renderings for the Triumph TR7 and a decidedly more appealing Maestro proposal. And many black-and-white images of the car that could have been the new Mini.

ADO88 was one of many attempts to replace it, and was philosophically true to the Issigonis car “so there was a wheel at each corner and minimum overhang", says Mann (pictured on the right).

“It was all about packaging. But it didn’t clinic [focus group] well, so it was modified to give the body more form.” The then cabal of endlessly changing BL management decided that the market research demanded this redesign but, explains Mann, some of the tooling had already been commissioned, “so we could only play around with sides and tailgate”.

As is the way with these things there was an internal competition to decide on the winning style, explains Roger Tucker.

He won the internal competition with his new sides for the car. “I cheated!” he says, explaining that although the redesign required that they stick to the exterior dimensions of ADO88, he added just over an inch to the car’s tail to allow the rear window more of a fastback rake, and added width to its waist to allow for some form in the sides.

“It gave the car a fuller, less flat-sided look, which is why it looked over-bodied,” says Mann.

The too-narrow track doubtless what lead US magazine Car and Driver to describe it as a “sorry little reconnaissance vehicle”. Mann remembers “saying something about the track - it looked awful. But engineering said we had to get it out”, the project already late because of the redesign. In fact, says Tucker, pointing to the unchanged, ADO88 sills, “it was nothing to do with extra width; it already had the problem”.

The delays were caused both by the redesign and production engineering director Harold Musgrove.

He “stopped it for six months to get quality right”, says Mann. “He could use the f-word in capitals. But he went for it – he hammered all departments to get the quality up to scratch.”

There’s no doubt that the Metro was a better built Austin.

Partly because of Musgrove and the monumental efforts of his colleagues, but also because the Metro’s shell was built on what was then one of the most advanced body shops in Europe. More than half the UK’s industrial robots lived at Longbridge when the Metro was launched, a fact much celebrated at the time.

Today, while venerated by diehards, the Metro risks becoming forgotten, in part because it’s so ordinary, now, and because the company that made it has largely disappeared. Yet without it BL and its descendants wouldn’t have survived another 25 years, and BMW (and Rover) probably wouldn’t have developed 2001’s replacement for the Mini.