Once common cars that you don't see anymore

[Pumesta]

Those things were actually exported? And somebody bought one? And then somebody went through importing it back again?

Amazing!

Even more amazing in 2001 a Chinese cigarette manufacture started making them again

 

[Coog]

My dad's best mate ran them for years. They were about 25% cheaper than any thing else available new at the time and although were a bit crap were also very cheap motoring. Ferried him and the family with caravan all over Europe. There was much piss taking but the Perkins engined turbo diesel ones went on and on. And was surprisingly rapid at the time too.

I also remember reading somewhere that the factory was so poorly designed that bare shells were transferred from one facility to another outside before they were painted as there was a road or dual carriageway in the way. Anyway, shells loaded onto a lorry and moved to another building using external roads. Out in the salt and rain and all sorts. It's no wonder they rusted like mad.

Saw a 51 reg'd one in Leicester a number of years ago and thought someone was running it on stolen plates. Amazingly, not the case.

Shamelessly stolen from Wikipedia:

In 1997, Parkway Services of Ledbury, Herefordshire, purchased a batch of 621 Maestro cars and vans in CKD kit form. These had been stored at Cowley, Oxfordshire, since their production in mid-1996, when they became surplus to requirements. The company built up the cars and converted the majority of them to RHD form using up Rover's supply of parts. The National Database for Motoring Insurance has records of models registered between "R" and "51" number plates, meaning the overall period of Maestro availability, new in the United Kingdom, was from 1983 to 2001.

In 1998 the Maestro was relaunched in the UK, by Wheeler International Ltd. Sold by Apple 2000 in Bury St Edmunds, Maestros were imported from Bulgaria and sold in the UK, France & Spain, these were the last factory examples available for sale. On the 10th February 2001 in The Independent's Edition of Your Money, Apple 2000 and the Maestro were Featured on the front page. In the Motoring section James Ruppert reports "FANCY a brand new Maestro?" you can have one for just £4299 and all remaining cars are appropriately finished in black.

The tooling was then sold to First Automobile Works (FAW) in China, where the Maestro was available to the Chinese motoring market in both hatchback and van models. A new addition to the range was the FAW Lubao CA6410 – a Maestro hatch with a Montego front end. A handful of Chinese-made parts were imported into Britain whilst these cars were in production, which itself ended in 2005.

Love this sort of stuff

 

[gary1365]

My granda was a taxi driver and I remember him buying a perkins engined montego and it being a engine. We both loved the noise of the turbo spooling up.

I don't think the build quality was good on the rest of the car though.

 

[Coog]

Attrocious and class in equal measures:

1987 AUSTIN MAESTRO 1.6 Vanden Plas Manual Petrol | eBay

Find many great new & used options and get the best deals for 1987 AUSTIN MAESTRO 1.6 Vanden Plas Manual Petrol at the best online prices at eBay! Free delivery for many products!

www.ebay.co.uk

Dad's best mates brother had a turbo and I got a run out in it once. It felt like a complete rocket ship.

0-60 in 6.7 which at the time made it one of the fastest hatches on the market.

 

[cormac81]

Attrocious and class in equal measures:

1987 AUSTIN MAESTRO 1.6 Vanden Plas Manual Petrol | eBay

Find many great new & used options and get the best deals for 1987 AUSTIN MAESTRO 1.6 Vanden Plas Manual Petrol at the best online prices at eBay! Free delivery for many products!

www.ebay.co.uk

Dad's best mates brother had a turbo and I got a run out in it once. It felt like a complete rocket ship.

View attachment 286026

0-60 in 6.7 which at the time made it one of the fastest hatches on the market.

Know a guy who restored one of these just like that in red. Must be very rare now.

 

[FM155]

My dad's best mate ran them for years. They were about 25% cheaper than any thing else available new at the time and although were a bit crap were also very cheap motoring. Ferried him and the family with caravan all over Europe. There was much piss taking but the Perkins engined turbo diesel ones went on and on. And was surprisingly rapid at the time too.

I also remember reading somewhere that the factory was so poorly designed that bare shells were transferred from one facility to another outside before they were painted as there was a road or dual carriageway in the way. Anyway, shells loaded onto a lorry and moved to another building using external roads. Out in the salt and rain and all sorts. It's no wonder they rusted like mad.

Saw a 51 reg'd one in Leicester a number of years ago and thought someone was running it on stolen plates. Amazingly, not the case.

Shamelessly stolen from Wikipedia:



Love this sort of stuff

I'm a former serial Maestro and Montego owner, as above, they were cheap as chips and tbh pretty good to drive, especially when you were upgrading from years of Marina and Ital ownership lol. The Maestro / Montego platform was heavily based on the Mk1 Golf and the early 1.3 and 1.6 models used the early golf gearboxes, you can use Mk1 Golf suspension in them for example. The Perkins diesel was a cracking engine, bit noisy but I never met anyone in an engine reconditioning outfit that had ever seen inside one.
I bought my first one in 1992 as a 1989 base model 1.3 City from Moore's of Randalstown as a trade in they didn't want. (Moore's had their workshop ABOVE their showroom just as you came in over the bridge in Randalstown, I guess because the cars were nicely on show to passing cars that could ogle at the sparkly wonder that Austin Rover could offer... ) It had been used as a farm car and was rough as ballix cosmetically but sound enough body wise. I stripped it down and sprayed it as there was marks all over it, got some secondhand bumpers for it and pressed it into service. Pretty quickly, I realised it could handle but had no grip so I got some late model Montego Steel wheels and trims from the scrappy and a set of Monroe Gasmatics and -60mm springs from Moto-Build who were the go-to Maestro/Monego whisperers of the time.
After a year or two, I got another one and gave mine to the Mrs on the usual zero payments, full service basis ( I know, I shouldn't have spoiled her with such luxury..). The new one was a 1.3L with plastic bumpers as opposed to the metal ones on the City and snazzy two tone Oyster gold over Grey paint. I'm really selling the tat-worthiness of it here but in fairness, I don't have to try lol.
After a bit of a tidy up, I fitted Spax coilovers, Montego Turbo ARB's, Rover Sport uprated bushes from the one make race series (Yes, really), braced and plated the crossmember to stiffen it up in preparation for the engine. I'd got hold of an early R-Series 1600 out of a rusty MG1600 Maestro, these ran twin 40 DCNF's and made around 90bhp as standard. I re-built the engine with a ported head, Kent fast road cam, lightened flywheel, balanced bottom end and mated it to the 1.3 box for the low final drive but made a quickshift linkage at the box for it. It made 145bhp on the roller at Auto carb and injection in Lisburn and given it was 800 odd kilo's, went very well and surprised a lot of quick stuff. I loved having something that people sneered at but went well.

Sounded well too


Somewhere along the way, I picked up a 2.0Efi MG Montego as the family bus too. Great handling car and went OK for it's day, I took it round the IOM TT course one night when we were over there on holiday in a homage to Tony Pond's 100mph lap in the 827. It had a few bits and bobs done to it too, full Janspeed system, shocks and springs.

My god they could rust though, putting wheelarch panels in them became a bit old eventually.

 

[cauld1]

I do like the derision that seems to appear when a BL product is brought up. They weren't really any more crap than a lot of the now sought after stuff from the period in the same market bracket (heres looking at you Ford).

The exception to that rule is the Marina. ****, utter ****.

 

[Jaystar77]

I learned to drive in a red MG Montego.

Thought it looked great at the time but the electrics had a mind of their own!

 

[FM155]

Marina's were so crap, they were class lol. We ran mostly 1.3's with the usual A-Series mods, TR7 steel wheels and late Ital front suspension with telescopic shocks. In the mid 80's, we used to follow the circuit around in them and had no bother keeping up the any of the pushrod Mk2's that we ran around with. They could rust too though.
Still have a '74 Coupe in the corner of the garage, gathering parts for a re-build.

 

[colin84]

My Aunt had a green MG Maestro, I loved it as a kid, especially with the talking computer, but it was forever breaking down. I don't know what the reason was, but the odd time when cold it would kangaroo badly. My Aunt and Granda were visiting someone at the Royal hospital in the early 90's and the car was parked on the falls Rd. When they came out the car was gone, looked up the road and there was the car violently kangarooing up the road, when they seen my granda running up the road behind them they abandoned it and he jumped in and drove it back again.

 

[gary1365]

I remember my da running cavaliers and an Orion and they never have the same trouble as my grandas bl cars. Him running them as taxis wouldn't have helped but I remember a lot of it was bad build quality letting them down.

 

[FM155]

The early MG's had the twin webers and a choke which was a bad combination for a daily driver. The standard airbox wrapped around the carbs and caused fuel evaporation in the float chambers, especially in traffic. They worked fine if you went flat out everywhere though.

 

[Lyons]

I absolutely hate the sight of them, up there with Allegros, Interceptors and Micras.

However I have a lot of time for a Montego!

 

[FM155]

Allegro's, INTERCEPTORS and Micra's That's an eclectic church of dislike...

Edit: All-agro's are a bit of fun, my dad had a 1500HL as a company car and it just kept eating wheel bearings. My dad suspected they weren't doing it right and got me to check the torque of the stub axle nut after it had been replaced by the BL main dealer for the nth time. Yup, they had done it up and backed it off by 1/4 turn like a RWD front wheel bearing, where it needed torqued to around 100ft-lb. Most of the dealers were sh1te tbh.

 

[gary1365]

Allegro's, INTERCEPTORS and Micra's That's an eclectic church of dislike...

I know micras are class lol.

 

[cauld1]

Allegros are just big minis really. Jonny Smith from fifth gear and smith and sniff (and ex max power) is building a really cool 3 door one with a v6 in it.

The unions ruined BL in fairness.

 

[Coog]

I'm a former serial Maestro and Montego owner, as above, they were cheap as chips and tbh pretty good to drive, especially when you were upgrading from years of Marina and Ital ownership lol. The Maestro / Montego platform was heavily based on the Mk1 Golf and the early 1.3 and 1.6 models used the early golf gearboxes, you can use Mk1 Golf suspension in them for example. The Perkins diesel was a cracking engine, bit noisy but I never met anyone in an engine reconditioning outfit that had ever seen inside one.
I bought my first one in 1992 as a 1989 base model 1.3 City from Moore's of Randalstown as a trade in they didn't want. (Moore's had their workshop ABOVE their showroom just as you came in over the bridge in Randalstown, I guess because the cars were nicely on show to passing cars that could ogle at the sparkly wonder that Austin Rover could offer... ) It had been used as a farm car and was rough as ballix cosmetically but sound enough body wise. I stripped it down and sprayed it as there was marks all over it, got some secondhand bumpers for it and pressed it into service. Pretty quickly, I realised it could handle but had no grip so I got some late model Montego Steel wheels and trims from the scrappy and a set of Monroe Gasmatics and -60mm springs from Moto-Build who were the go-to Maestro/Monego whisperers of the time.
After a year or two, I got another one and gave mine to the Mrs on the usual zero payments, full service basis ( I know, I shouldn't have spoiled her with such luxury..). The new one was a 1.3L with plastic bumpers as opposed to the metal ones on the City and snazzy two tone Oyster gold over Grey paint. I'm really selling the tat-worthiness of it here but in fairness, I don't have to try lol.
After a bit of a tidy up, I fitted Spax coilovers, Montego Turbo ARB's, Rover Sport uprated bushes from the one make race series (Yes, really), braced and plated the crossmember to stiffen it up in preparation for the engine. I'd got hold of an early R-Series 1600 out of a rusty MG1600 Maestro, these ran twin 40 DCNF's and made around 90bhp as standard. I re-built the engine with a ported head, Kent fast road cam, lightened flywheel, balanced bottom end and mated it to the 1.3 box for the low final drive but made a quickshift linkage at the box for it. It made 145bhp on the roller at Auto carb and injection in Lisburn and given it was 800 odd kilo's, went very well and surprised a lot of quick stuff. I loved having something that people sneered at but went well.
View attachment 286029
View attachment 286030
Sounded well too


Somewhere along the way, I picked up a 2.0Efi MG Montego as the family bus too. Great handling car and went OK for it's day, I took it round the IOM TT course one night when we were over there on holiday in a homage to Tony Pond's 100mph lap in the 827. It had a few bits and bobs done to it too, full Janspeed system, shocks and springs.

View attachment 286032

My god they could rust though, putting wheelarch panels in them became a bit old eventually.

That sounds brilliant. That's what it's all about there!

 

[Crow555]

I watched an episode of James May's Cars of the people which I think was dealing with postwar car production. He was speaking with the guy who originally designed the Allegro and it went from this...

To this...

Seems the various committees got involved and turned it into a right dog's dinner.

 

[Pumesta]

The Yema F12, is a re skinned Maestro

 

[Coog]

Brilliant.

Yema F12 takes Maestro platform further…

Yema, the current owner of the long-lived Maestro/Montego platform and tooling in China, has released its third SUV model, the F12. It's a facelift of a

www.aronline.co.uk

 

[Paddy_R]

The Yema F12, is a re skinned Maestro

From the wing mirrors back there's a fair hint of Subaru Forester in that... In side profile anyway.

Edit.... Just read that link and it seems I'm not the only one who thought it looks a bit like a Subaru from the side.

 

[gary1365]

From the side it looks like a child drew a forester lol

 

[mikey]

The uncle has a variety of BL stuff about him at the moment including MG Maestros, Maxis, an ex RUC armoured Rover Montego, Marinas and SD1s but the ‘Unicorn’ in the collection is the super rare Allegro 1750ss which will be restored some day...if my uncle lives to be 150 lol. Quartic steering wheel is the dream

 

[mikey]

My daily driver the past 8 years. Don’t know how common they were back in the 90s as they were expensive compared to other offerings. Have a period advert from 1994 listing the base model Celica 1.8ST at £17995 and for £2k more you were having an Impreza Turbo 2000!

 

[FM155]

@mikey The MOTHERLOAD lol
Love that, the R-Series 1600 was a development of the 1500/1750 that was in the allegro, maxi and a few others. Had a lot of BL tin in my younger days, mostly because they were cheap motoring.