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Confessions of a Car Addict: Austin Allegro
1 year ago
The nose famously wasn't quite as sleek as designer Harris Mann intended
I gorged on everything I could read about this car, my fascination for it only heightened when the mother of one of the boys in my class dropped him off at school in one. His dad, it turned out, was the managing director of Austin-Morris. The Allegro in question was a top-of-the-range 1750 Sport Special, flaunting a vinyl roof, alloy-wheel mimicking hubcaps – they’d never have made RADA – and an ochre interior that contrasted strikingly with its teal blue paint. In this finery, I thought the Allegro looked pretty good. The lesser models, not so much, this Austin’s blobbily amorphous shape and gaping wheelarches often presenting a decidedly unathletic sight.
‘The New Driving Force From Austin’, as BL’s publicity machine described its new progeny, was a replacement for the Austin-Morris 1100/1300. That car, effectively a scaled up Mini with fluid suspension and Pininfarina styling, was made in many forms – Austin, Morris, Wolseley, MG, Riley, Vanden Plas and even Innocenti in Italy – and had been a major success for the British Motor Corporation. Britain’s best-selling car for 10 years, sales reached 2.1 million over its 12-year life. When launched in 1962, it was without doubt the most advanced small family saloon in the world, a fact that encouraged many, this teenage enthusiast among them, to hope the Allegro would perform a similar leap into the future.
There was logic to its conception. The aim was to build on the 1300’s winning ways – handling, ride, stability, economy, space and style – and address its multiple failings. These started with its ability to rust almost from the moment it left the factory, to its odd driving position, small boot, awkwardly cramped engine bay and notchy gearchange, and ended with the likelihood that it would soon fail the MoT with a rusty rear subframe and/or cratering sills.
"The Quartic wheel was on borrowed time from the day salesmen had to pretend this weirdness was a good idea"
The Allegro improved on some of these things. It rusted far more slowly. There was plenty of working room around the engine. The boot swallowed more luggage, although it was awkward to load, and had the Allegro’s creators been better rune-readers, its lid would have been a hatchback. Simca’s massively successful 1100 had got there six years earlier, after all.
No longer did you sit behind an awkwardly angled steering wheel. But you did confront the most controversial element of the Allegro confection: its square steering wheel. It wasn’t literally square, its four corners rounded off, but the ‘cam’ effect as they rotated past your hands annoyed road testers no end. The Quartic wheel, as BL called it, was on borrowed time from the day salesmen had to pretend this weirdness was a good idea.
Still, there were things to get excited about. Hydragas suspension, for instance, this a development of the Hydrolastic used in all of British Leyland’s front-wheel drive models including, for a time, the Mini. There isn’t the space to explain the ingenious theory and practice of these Alex Moulton-designed, Dunlop-manufactured systems, but here are the rudiments. Both systems are interconnected front-to-rear on each side of the car, both use fluid as a connection medium between each Hydrolastic or Hydragas unit, but where they differ is in the springing medium. Hydrolastic units contain a large, compressible chunk of rubber that acts as a spring, while Hydragas employs compressible nitrogen to do the same. Internal valving provides the damping, the stiffness of this varying in bump, roll and bounce. Which was supposedly the clever bit, but the net Hydragas effect was a car that mostly felt at sea.
“Despite Car magazine’s enthusiasm the Allegro inevitably came last in its Giant Test comparing the Austin with the Alfasud and Citroën GS, while France’s L’Auto-Journal asked why the supposedly sporting top-of-the-range 1750 SS was no faster than a decent 1300”
Not that I was able to find this out for myself. Being too young even to drive an Allegro, never mind buy one, I worked on my grandparents instead. Even though I liked them. My grandfather replaced his Morris 1300 every year in order to have a car that was always under warranty. To do the same in 1973 he would need to buy an Allegro. A few months later a 1300 four-door Super arrived, in glacier white with navy upholstery. I was thrilled. Whether he was I’m less sure – he certainly struggled with the heavier steering, although a lifetime of smoking filter-less Players cigarettes probably didn’t help.
Meanwhile the Allegro was facing the reality of group tests and overseas reviews that were less forgiving than the domestic variety. Despite Car magazine’s enthusiasm the Allegro inevitably came last in its Giant Test comparing the Austin with the Alfasud and Citroën GS, while France’s L’Auto-Journal asked why the supposedly sporting top-of-the-range 1750 SS was no faster than a decent 1300.
It was a fair point. Less than two years after the Allegro’s launch the 1750 Sport and SS got twin-carb, 90bhp 1748cc engines that dropped 0-60mph times to under 11 seconds, while usefully shortening the lives of the scrabbling front tyres. But it was an improvement, such news lapped up by this BL fanboy. A still hotter story (for me) emerged mere months later with the announcement of the Allegro 2, a beast a little closer to what the original should have been in the first place. Apart from a smattering of cosmetic changes there were upgrades to the Hydragas, more rear legroom, improved seats and a rejig of the range that saw the 1750 Sport, a laughably inadequate rival to the Alfasud Ti or a hot Escort, deleted from the range.
The twin-carb 1750 motor survived, however, now with an HL trim package. It was one of these Allegros I would buy 30-odd years after the launch, although I don’t quite know why. I’d driven several while a trainee at BL, the best of them a 1300 used as the internal post car that ran between Longbridge and Redditch. Its fate was to be driven flat out everywhere, its well-loosened A Series motor producing surprising pep. It even handled quite well, but as with every All-aggro, the driveline shunt when you applied or disapplied the throttle was a seismic refinement destroyer.
But back to that HL. It was red, had a black vinyl roof and a velour interior in a hue called mink, by now grubby blanket grey. As promised it was unexpectedly brisk, the unexpectedness surprising much of its front end, the suspension, tyres and steering unable to cope with sudden 100lb ft torque chunks surging through its driveshafts. If it was dry you’d get tight bend understeer, if it was wet you’d get tight bend understeer so severe you wouldn’t make the bend at all. The HL was much better on fast sweepers, which it could mostly devour in fifth, the Allegro’s torque-to-weight ratio almost exciting.
Most exciting of all was when I took it on an organised classic car run that took in Castle Combe race track, a circuit I knew well from comparison tests. It was not long before I was overtaking all kinds of sporting machinery, partly because of the torque, partly because I knew my way around. There were apoplectics, the most vocal of them a Triumph TR6 driver, arguing that the Allegro was not a classic and that it (and I) should be banned. Still, I got my comeuppance, having cooked the clutch from repeat lapping.
I sold the HL to an Autocar reader who stored it in a heated garage with an Aston Martin, and went Allegro-less for a while. And then came the chance to own a model inferior to the HL, in the equally dumpy, vinyl-capped shape of a 1750 SS, found on eBay. The Sport Special had by now become the Holy Grail of Allegro-dom, unless you sought the renamed, Italian-built, better-dressed and utterly unsuccessful Innocenti Regent.
I bid, I won, I drove to Falmouth with a trailer and collected a shabby but sound specimen of which restoration had already begun. This was the single-carb, pre-facelift SS and thus slower than the HL, and slightly less couth. But, I now had the exact version of the car I’d coveted four decades earlier. Even though I had since owned an Alfasud and a GS, confirming that both were better drives than the Austin. I guess it’s explained by nostalgia, and the power of partisanship.
This SS was gradually restored with welding, a repaint, a new dashboard and loads of other new-old stock parts before being sold, not quite finished, to a friend of a friend who, as you can see from the pictures, completed its rejuvenation to great effect.
Why didn’t I finish it? Perhaps to avoid the disappointment of driving a car that was so roundly average at everything, advanced suspension or not. Perhaps because my interest in this miss-by-a-mile Austin has faded, its story one of the many contributing to the demise of its maker. Whichever, I can’t see myself owning another.
