The Leyland P76 Was Destined for Success. Then It Became Australia's Edsel

There may have been a place for another full-size car in the Australian market during the Seventies. There may have been an appetite for an advanced competitor to the Ford Falcons, Holden Kingswoods, and Chrysler Valiants, especially if it proved more economical and better built. There may have been a place for the Leyland P76 when it was introduced 50 years ago, had things not gone awfully wrong for the car that has since become the butt of many an Australian automotive enthusiast's joke.

Before the 1968 merger of Leyland Motors and British Motor Holdings that formed British Leyland, BMC's Australian arm did a brisk business selling the Mini and a range of other economical cars. Despite the success of the lineup, limited parts sharing among BMCA's cars hurt profitability, so David Beech and his colleagues at BMC's Australian arm formed a plan to design and build two cars by and for the Australian market: a mid-size car to be released in 1973 and a full-size family car a year later.

Beech, however, was taken aback by the merger and the swift decision to greenlight the Marina, a car that fit neatly into his team's plans for the mid-size car. Those plans, however, allowed the team to focus all of their resources on the full-size car. Those resources weren't vast, however: His initial request for a AU$30 million budget got whittled down to AU$21 million, which was to cover both development of the car and refurbishment of an existing assembly line in the company's Zetland factory previously used for building small cars. Internally designated YDO26 (for a sedan version) and YDO27 (for a coupe version), the full-size car was given the nod by British Leyland in England in late 1968.

Leyland brochure image

While many stories about the P76 simply note that the car's styling came from Giovanni Michelotti, Michelotti's involvement was actually limited, according to Dave Carey's history of the P76 for Street Machine magazine. Beech did visit Michelotti in Turin hoping to get the famed designer on board with the project, but his decision to do so without consulting Romand Rodbergh, the chief stylist for BMCA, didn't sit well with Rodbergh. Granted, Rodbergh and his team had only tweaked existing designs and never taken on a full from-scratch design project before, but the decision bothered him so much he spent his holidays working on styling proposals that he sent straight to Donald Stokes, the head of British Leyland in England.

Rodbergh's design famously incorporated a capacious trunk—large enough for a full 44-gallon drum—which, combined with an angular and horizontal grille, gave it something of a wedge design, which was just then becoming vogue among car designers. (Yes, Max was able to fit two big ol' drums in the boot of his Interceptor, but those were different circumstances.) His design also beat out not only the styling proposals submitted by Michelotti, but also those submitted by Karmann and British Leyland's studios in Longbridge, though as Carey noted, the marketing department still wanted Michelotti's name attached to the design, so Beech had the latter "finesse" Rodbergh's design.

How much of the engineering of the P76 took place in Australia, on the other hand, isn't as clear. Carey notes that Leyland engineers, without the luxury of a private proving grounds, bought a small fleet of Holdens to which they progressively added more P76 components over the next two and a half years. However, Keith Adams of AROnline notes that the limited budget meant relying on existing British Leyland work. "There was no way that this was going to be a clean-sheet design at this funding level and much existing Rover-Triumph hardware would need to be incorporated in order to make the P76 programme pay for itself," Adams wrote. In fact, Adams has suggested that the P76 could have been derived from the stillborn Rover P8, an attempt to build a V-8 luxury sedan that came too close to the Jaguar XJ6.

Leyland brochure image

Whatever the case, the P76 emerged with a 4.4-liter version of the 3.5-liter Rover V-8 (itself a derivative of the all-aluminum Buick 215 used in the early 1960s) good for 200 horsepower and 280 pound-feet of torque, a Borg-Warner automatic transmission, standard front disc brakes, MacPherson strut suspension, and the 111-inch wheelbase considered standard for full-size Australian cars. British Leyland reportedly offered to purchase straight-six engines from the other Australian car manufacturers, but with a short engine bay designed around the V-8, the company found that only its E-series overhead-camshaft six-cylinder from the Austin/Morris 2200, with some minor revisions and a displacement increase to 2.6 liters, would fit.

The P76 sedan bowed in 1973 to quick acclaim. Leyland Australia noted that it had Australian size and European sensibilities. Australian magazine Wheels declared it the car of the year. It received high marks for its handling and for the V-8 engine. One even won the Targa Florio stage in the 1974 World Cup Rally. For a moment, it looked like the Leyland P76 would establish British Leyland as a serious contender in the full-size Australian car market. The company laid plans for a 3.3-liter V-6 derivative of the V-8 engine and for a full line-up of variants, including a ute, a station wagon, and a coupe. The coupe, a hatchback called the Force 7V, actually made it to limited production before plans for it were scuttled. Leyland fully intended the P76 to carry the Australian division through the Seventies and for it to eventually make its way to England.

Leyland brochure image, courtesy John Lloyd / Flickr

So what went wrong with the Leyland P76? To begin with, it debuted at a time of rising inflation that tanked car sales across the board in Australia. As Carey noted, Holden sales were down 11 percent and Ford sales were down 7 percent. It wouldn't have been a good year for any carmaker to introduce a new model. Add in the 1973 oil crisis, which hit not long after the car's introduction, and suddenly full-size V-8 cars became a harder sell.

It also turned out that Beech and his staff had rushed the P76 into production. Carey rattled off a list of common defects, including windshield and door sill seals, dashboards that distorted in the sun, shifter handles that fell off in the driver's hand, an inadequately sized air-conditioning compressor, and poorly fitting trim and body panels. Leyland Australia put in requests to England for design changes to handle the defects, but British Leyland penny-pinchers reportedly determined it would cost less to handle warranty claims than to make the design changes, so "with scant room on the factory floor and no money to fix the production line, Leyland Australia set up the Rectification Centre, a two-million-dollar facility with 60 highly trained staff tasked with making the cars fit for sale," Carey wrote. "Once established, almost every completed car went through the centre for repair work."

Leyland brochure image

One of those jokes: Why should Leyland have called it the P38 instead? Because it was half the car it should have been.

Maybe the timing was off, and maybe Leyland Australia could have ironed out the P76's production woes. But what really sealed the P76's fate was the parent company's woes. Corporate mismanagement and poor sales put the company far into debt, leading executives to shutter factories in Spain, Italy, South Africa, and Australia. The Zetland factory produced its last car in November 1974, not two years after the P76's introduction. Just 18,007 P76s were built.

That's not to say that there's no enthusiasm for the P76 in Australia. The remaining Force 7V coupes are well documented and highly sought after, Gerry Crown's P76 won the Classic category in the 2013 and 2016 Peking to Paris rallies, and an active P76 owners club in Australia keeps tabs on the parts and knowledge necessary to maintain the cars.