Paul Jolly: The little racer that could

I have a great fondness for the Hillman Imp (1963-1976) partly due to it being designed by my cousin Tim Fry with his colleague at The Rootes Group, Mike Parkes.

Mike sadly died in Italy in 1977 after an illustrious F1 career and also racing for Ferrari. 

The Imp was developed to go head-to-head with the BMC Mini but for a variety of reasons it never matched the sales figures of the Mini. However, the Govt of the day had a habit of involving itself in industrial affairs with varying degrees of failure. 

There was the fiasco of the Hillman Imp being part built at Coventry, then being transported on trains to Linwood near Glasgow for further assembly, then the cars returned by train to Coventry for final finishing. Grants were given to Rootes all in the name of appeasing unions whose shipbuilding businesses on the Clyde were in decline.

The workforce had a distinct lack of skills suited to car assembly and this showed in the finished product which suffered terrible quality control issues. These added costs meant the car could never compete properly with its main competitor, the Mini. It might have been cheaper to bus the workforce down to Coventry each week and put them up in five-star hotels!

Only half a million were made against five million Minis. But as this little modified racer shows, despite just 875cc, they were competitive and handled well due to rear engine RWD configuration rather like the Porsche 911. Many still exist for classic racing purposes.

Government intervention also helped no one at BL with the appointment of Donald Stokes as chairman and MD whose background was as head of Leyland Trucks. A salesman essentially, he never got to grips with the scale and politics of BL with infighting caused by the forced merger of uncomfortable bedfellows such as Rover/Triumph or MG and Jaguar.

BL needed better direction than to produce mustard Marinas and almond Allegros even if it was the 1970s. These abominations replaced the highly successful Austin and Morris 1100/1300 range which in their day were best sellers.