Austin Allegro: The Car's the Star Part One

'only Fusaro resides a man with a mission a say in an educated person a deeply religious soul his theology passes all understanding his faith is often questioned yet he believes with a passionate fervor that the object of his devotion is worthy of canonization this is a man who spends his life telling his flock to open their hearts to the beauty that is the austin allegro I love cars all cars that have done a soft spot the oxygen Allegro the shape is absolutely wonderful I mean I happen to like the shape of the Allegro it is a car it's fashionable to make jokes about the thing is the car is not as bad as people make it out to be um there is a line where it has to stop because it's bad to insult the taste of someone who owns an Allegro or indeed to deny the fact that he's actually seriously cheap and quite reliable transport 1973 was not a happy year the British industry the country was in the grip of one of the worst recession since the war miners gas workers dustman and civil servants were all on strike and even the tea you see couldn't control the unities the Allegro stumbled blinking into an anarchic world of commercial chaos when British Leyland workers couldn't wait to rush home from the excitement a three-day week considering you're better off on three days you know you're getting the same amount of money for doing forward dice but not the same amount of production oh yeah how dishes management was in it while the rest of Britain fumbled in the darkness the spotlight fell on British Leyland's great white hope Allegro the new driving force from Austin popomon Sears for a test drive they say that cars reflect their times if that's the case then the Austin Allegro must be remembered as an awful monument to everything that was wrong with British industry in the seventies and it began life here at the British Leyland factory in Longbridge Birmingham it was underdeveloped designed by blind committees and assembled in an atmosphere of industrial terrorism this then is the Austin Allegro story the car that British Leyland once proudly boasted would be their song for Europe launched on the 17th of May 1973 Allegro's kicked off at nine hundred and fifty pounds for the 1100 deluxe rising to thirteen hundred and sixty-six for the unfortunately named 1750s s but it wasn't just meant to do battle with the Vauxhall Viva and Hillman Avenger they had much much higher hopes it's very important because this covers the middle range between the 1100 and 1750 where the bulk of the business is and it's also a car which we think will not will appeal not only to the sophisticated British public but sophisticated European public which of course is very much greater now that we're in the common market it's a car we believe that will appeal to European tastes as a whole trouble was the Allegro's predecessor was a much-loved part of Britain's motoring culture most of the time welcome shame Lord you I've laid it on the lines of you time and time again I'm gonna give you a damn good thrashing but the 11-hundred was a great favorite with the British middle classes for over a decade neat and crisply styled with transverse engines and hide elastic suspension it's sold by the million now if bill had only stuck to that original winning formula things might have been different but they didn't Gone with the pin-sharp proportions of the 1100 replaced by something with all the elegance of an old shoe and it's those bathtub curves that have always haunted the Allegro so just how could BL senior management have got it so horribly wrong believe it or not this is how the Allegro's designer had wanted it to look the Allegro shape evolved from a package requirement which was dictated by engineering which was to put in a variety of engines from the 1100 and also to put in the maxi engine as well maxi engine was a rather large engine there was also a new heater which was carried over from the marina but once these new requirements started to come in the height went up the body got a little bit more bloated and from original concepts that we've created in the studio and they weren't able to be achieved anymore how did you feel when you saw the finished Allegro and compared it to your original rather handsome sketch disappointed really I think that the specification that we've been dictated to didn't allow us really to regenerate a new 1,100 you BL launched the car to the press in sunny mom Baron generated some cheerful first impressions British Leyland have got down to some really radical thinking about what the family car should be to Europe in the 70s and the 80s and here comes the answer the Allegro and I must confess when I first saw it it's a shape that didn't greatly grab me but I find the more you see it the more you like it it grows on you the most radical thing about the Allegro was its new hydro gas suspension claimed to be an improvement over the 1100 s hydro lastic variety this strange-looking object is the springing system the hydro gas unit one of these two each wheel taking the place of a spring and a shock absorber hydro gas suspension does eliminate with the aid of a computer all the thoughts of the heart elastic the height elastic I've got known as the shirt lifter because of the bouncing movements which would just pull a man's shirt out of out of the waistband of his trousers throughout driving along but that's gone this vertical bounce has disappeared this is a unique British achievement they don't roll very much they really do go very quickly along a winding road some journalists weren't quite so complimentary having driven one ago in this afternoon for all the first time for several years now it still feels exactly the same the steering gets heavy when you start to go around corners at any speed that the ride is even bouncier than I remember the interior is all plastic which is something that's very quickly told against it so now I can't say that I'm very repentant about the fact that I was rude about it in 1973-74 but in retrospect I suppose the only thing you can say is that it stood the test of time a lot better than the the other cars that British Leyland launched in the same kind of period but it did have inertia reel seatbelts radial ply tires and a heated rear window is standard even though the embossed vinyl seats looked about as inviting as Victorian dining chairs but there was one area of the car upon which everybody agreed that steering wheel should be round and not square and that the infamous quartic wheel was not a good thing I must quote you from the brochure at the time it says this must sound like a gimmick but it isn't it's more square shape than circular so it gives you a much better look at your instruments when you're driving it also lets you get in and out of the car more easily I must say with hindsight that that says to me in fact they originally designed together the round steering wheel you couldn't see the instruments you couldn't get in and probably people will accuse me of being biased but I'm also wearing a dog collar and I am a clergyman that the quartic wheel to me is a totally unremarkable device it happens to be fitted to a car I like a great deal I've just driven 4,600 miles in two weeks behind one for charity and I came back that she wanted to change my everyday cultures around steering wheel to a quartic really I honestly did you

Channel: rovamota

Views: 115,383

Rating: 4.8187704 out of 5

Keywords: Austin, Allegro, Morris, British Leyland

Id: Wu48FVwUnO8

Length: 9min 33sec (573 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 29 2008