The Morris Marina is a car that was manufactured by Austin-Morris division of British Leyland from 1971 until 1980. It was sold in some markets as the Austin Marina, the Leyland Marina and the Morris 1700.
It was a popular car in Britain throughout its production life, narrowly pipping the Ford Escort to second place in the UK car sales table in 1973 and regularly taking third or fourth place in other years. The car was also exported throughout the world, including North America, and assembled with varying degrees of popularity in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Malaysia. According to various sources, the Marina ranks among the worst cars ever built.
The 1980 replacement for the Marina, the closely related Ital, was essentially a body facelift and a change to the front suspension that replaced lever dampers with telescopic dampers in 1982 for the final two years of production but still retained torsion bars, to address criticism from the motoring press. Still, it sold reasonably well in the home market.
The Marina was developed under the ADO 28 codename. The impetus for its development came when Leyland Motors merged with British Motor Holdings (BMH) in 1968, thus forming British Leyland. BMH was the corporate parent of the two biggest car manufacturers in the UK, Austin and Morris. The new BL management, made largely from ex-Leyland Motors staff, were shocked to learn that apart from the Austin Maxi (then entering the final stages of development) and a tentative design for a replacement for the Mini (the 9X) BMH had no new cars under development. The company's products aimed at the mass-market consisted of the Morris Minor, dating from 1948, and the 'Farina' range of mid-sized Austin and Morris saloons that were a decade old. BL rapidly implemented a plan to develop a replacement for both the Minor and the smaller Farina models that could be produced as quickly as possible and would be on sale for no more than five years until a genuinely "all new" product could be launched in its place.
To try to introduce some clear distinctions between its multiple brands BL decided to release conservative, traditionally engineered cars under the Morris name, and sell more adventurous cars as Austins, or even as new marques – such as the Austin Allegro and Princess. Specifically this meant that Austins use the groundbreaking transverse-engine front-wheel-drive layout developed by Alec Issigonis. It was thus decided that the ADO 28 would be badged as a Morris. It would use a conventional rear-wheel drive, live rear axle drive train as found on other popular mass-market cars such as the Ford Escort and Vauxhall Viva. This strategy was also intended to improve sales in BL's export markets. Commonwealth markets such as South Africa, Australia and New Zealand were large buyers of BL products, but the innovative BMC cars were considered too fragile and complex for use in such countries, as well as being fitted exclusively with small, low-powered engines. As a result, the Marina was unadventurous but simple, making use of tried and trusted BMC components derived from the Morris Minor and MGB, as well as using mainly Triumph Dolomite transmission and running gear from the former Leyland side of the organisation. The car was designed by Roy Haynes, the same man who designed the Ford Cortina Mark II (launched in 1966), with which it shares some stylistic similarities. Lacking the budget to develop two cars to compete directly with the Escort and the Cortina, the makers sized the ADO 28 between the two benchmark Ford models. Haynes' original idea was to produce the car in coupé and saloon versions with the coupé pitched as a premium, sporting version, in a similar mould to the Ford Capri – a popular coupé based on Cortina running gear – to appeal to younger buyers, while the saloon was for the crucial company car market and families.
Roy Haynes also attempted to put forward a system that many manufacturers now use: a common floor plan shared between models. The Marina was the first car design that used this idea. Although this idea carried great potential benefits for a company selling cars under numerous different brands across multiple market sectors it was looked on as too radical by the management of British Leyland and Triumph designer Harry Webster was drafted in to push the project forward. Roy Haynes soon left the company. This protracted development period and the numerous changes made to the design by the various people working on it had a major effect on the Marina. It meant that the Marina (a car intended to be basic and conventional) cost more to develop than the Austin Allegro, its more technically and aesthetically advanced stablemate. This is often held up as a prime example of British Leyland's poor project and cost management.
The British Leyland Board decided to build the Marina at the ex-Morris Motors plant at Cowley in Oxford, which was largely unchanged since the 1920s. The plant had insufficient capacity – British manufacturers had difficulties in meeting demand in the post-war years – which increased design and production costs significantly, since Leyland had to rebuild the plant.
The Marina was originally designed to use the E-series OHC BMC engines. These engines had a number of design problems. A modular engine design, the E series had standard bores, with capacity increased by using either more cylinders or larger strokes. However, small-capacity sixes fell out of favour as post-war Britain became increasingly affluent.[clarification needed]
To increase capacity, BL preferred increasing stroke, which added little to the cost of production. This resulted in a tall engine. It was not possible to slant the engine, because of the location of the fuel pump. Furthermore, the engine had to be "siamesed", that is, the water jacket was shared between pairs of cylinders. These factors contributed to overheating and oil burning in the Austin Maxi, and so the board decided to adopt the more reliable A and B- series engines for indigenous production. (Australia and South Africa continued with the E series.) However, the body had already been designed, so the Marina was forever cursed with a "full nappy" rear-end styling, needed to even the lines between the necessarily bloated front and the rear.
The engine assembly line was bifurcated by a municipal road; Leyland had to build an overpass, further increasing cost. The Birmingham local authority then agreed to sell the road to Leyland after the overpass had been completed. This increased the cost even further.
Numerous redesigns also meant that the final design of the Marina was rushed, as the project's final deadline grew near. The car went from design stage to production in just 18 months. Consequently, the board decided to cut costs and abandon Macpherson struts in favour of an old design from the Morris Minor. They also abandoned a project to design a new 4-speed BMC gearbox. As a further cost-cutting measure the coupé version of the Marina would now use the same front doors as the saloon version. This produced significant cost savings in tooling and assembly, but left the coupé as obvious styling derivative of the saloon rather than having a different, more sporting image as Roy Haynes had originally proposed. This made it impossible to pitch the coupé as a superior product, and so it was decided that the 2-door coupé version of the Marina would be the cheaper of the two body styles, with the 1.3-litre model directly replacing the entry-level 2-door version of the Morris Minor and competing with the 2-door saloon versions of the Ford Escort and the Hillman Avenger. Meanwhile, the 1.8-litre coupé models had no direct predecessor in the BL range and the closest equivalents were the sporting Ford Capri and the new Vauxhall Firenza. This gave the coupé a rather conflicted image – the sporty bodystyle led many buyers and testers to have expectations of the Marina coupé that the final product was never intended to meet, being mechanically identical to the standard saloon version. The Marina saloons more obvious market placements; the 1.3-litre saloon replaced the 4-door Minor while the 1.8-litre version superseded the Austin and Morris Farina saloons and the 1.8-litre Marina estate did the same for the outgoing estate versions of the Farina. The dashboard also suffered from being ergonomically illogical, with the radio and warning light controls facing away from the driver towards the passenger seat.
The indigenous engines were the venerable A-Series and B-Series units in 1.3- and 1.8-litre capacities, respectively, which drove rear wheels through a live axle. It featured torsion bar suspension at the front, leaf-spring suspension at the rear—and five body styles: saloon, estate, coupé, pickup, and van. The estate (station wagon) came in 1972, 18 months after the saloon and coupe, giving British Leyland a full-circle competitor for the Cortina and Capri. For extra performance, TC versions were equipped with a twin carburettor engine similar to that in the MG MGB for extra performance. These could be fitted with a body kit from BL Special Tuning that added front and rear spoilers, alloy wheels, extra lighting and other details. A 1.5-litre diesel version, using an engine developed from the B-Series, was offered in a few European countries where the tax rates favoured diesels. With no more than 37 or 40 hp on offer depending on the source, performance was often lethargic; 3,870 diesels were built between 1977 and 1980. They were never sold in Britain, where diesel engines were almost unheard of in passenger cars.
The new car was launched on the domestic market on 27 April 1971, with a night shift added at the Cowley plant in May 1971. At that time the manufacturers reported they were producing 2,000 cars per week, projecting over-optimistically to increase this to 5,000 cars per week by the end of 1971. Nevertheless, eleven months after launch, on 29 March 1972, the 100,000th Marina, a 1.8TC version, emerged from the Cowley plant and by February 1973 the company was able to announce that 250,000 Marinas had already been built in less than two years. The Marina continued in production from 1971 to 1980, when it was replaced by the Morris Ital (an updated version of the Marina) which continued in production until 1984, when the Morris marque was axed and the Austin badge featured on the Montego that replaced it, signalling the end of the Morris brand after more than 70 years. (With the discontinuation of the Morris 18-22 – also sold as an Austin and Wolseley – the Marina car and the Ital were the only noncommercial vehicles sold with the Morris badge after 1975.)
In Australia and South Africa it was known as the Leyland Marina, in New Zealand as the Morris 1.7 (for 1979–81, in face-lifted O-Series form), and in North America as the Austin Marina.
The car was popular with families and undemanding car buyers, and was available in the typical BL colours of the day – Russet Brown, Harvest Gold, Limeflower Green, Midnight Blue, Teal Blue, Blaze Orange, Damask Red and a characteristically 1970s purple called Black Tulip. It was intended to compete with the generally similar Ford Cortina (and to some extent the smaller Escort); the Vauxhall Viva and later the larger Cavalier; as well as the Hillman Avenger and Hunter from Chrysler UK. It shared its basic styling with all these cars, adopting a supposedly transatlantic look that took elements of car styling from contemporary American cars (especially the front-end treatment in the Marina's case) and offered them at a scale acceptable to the European market. As with its mechanics, the Marina was not intended to be visually innovative or particularly interesting – its Austin Allegro stablemate was the entry in that area of the market. A point of criticism with the Marina was that the windscreen-wiper set-up was "opposite" the driver. This was decided pre-production after drivers of the prototypes reported that airflow at certain speeds made the wiper closest to the A-post lift off the windscreen, potentially disrupting the driver's line of sight. The problem was judged sufficiently serious that the car went on sale with a wiper position as if for driving on the other side of the road, though subsequent road testers questioned the effectiveness of this decision and the basis for it.
BL was beset with problems including industrial action throughout the period, and the Marina was one of a number of models that suffered. While the labour disputes at BL eroded employment, manufacturers in Europe and Japan introduced innovative designs (such as the VW Golf) with which the Marina and its like were never likely to compete. Problems were compounded as the cars to replace the Marina and BL's other mid-size offerings were repeatedly delayed (eventually appearing as the Austin Maestro and Austin Montego in 1983–84). By this time Leyland had abandoned the idea of separate Austin and Morris ranges. There was not enough money to develop a full range of rear-wheel-drive Morris cars and an equivalent front-wheel-drive (FWD) Austin range, and FWD was increasingly accepted across the market.
There were changes, however, albeit small ones. A facelift in 1975 gave the Marina new radiator grilles, dashboard, seats, suspension modifications and increased soundproofing. In May 1977 Marinas started to appear at dealers equipped with Allegro style seats: apart from rationalising the procuring and production processes, this was said to make the Marina seating more comfortable and supportive. The overhead camshaft O-Series engine (also used for Leyland Princess) appeared in 1.7-litre form in 1978 to replace the larger B-Series 1.8-litre models. A changed grille, including driving lights, a front spoiler and redesigned bumpers and rear lights, were added to all models.
Under severe financial strain, BL was bailed out by the government under the Ryder Report of 1975, and Sir Michael Edwardes was brought in to oversee the company. Under his leadership, BL made an attempt to update the Marina, by enlisting the help of Giorgetto Giugiaro's Italdesign. ItalDesign, however, did not design the car, which was an in-house product — it merely made changes to its appearance. The result of this exercise, the 1980 Morris Ital features large rear-lamp clusters and a new front end, but the 1971 vintage of the design was obvious. The Ital lasted four years and was replaced by the Austin Montego in early 1984.
The Marina's public life did not get off to a good start. The rushed final stages of design and production, especially in regard to the suspension, meant that many of the press fleet cars had an incorrect front-suspension set-up, whereby there was no camber change when the car rolled, which in turn produced "almost heroic" levels of understeer:Autocar reported that the car they were driving ended up on the wrong side of the road when taking a sharp corner. This was a particular problem with the more powerful 1.8 and 1.8 TC cars, which were unfortunately the models the press were most likely to test, though the 1.3-litre models with their lighter engine did not suffer from the problem to the same extent. Early production Marinas were fitted with the original front suspension, although a different lower link-arm (trunnion) was fitted quite quickly. The best estimate is that about 30,000 cars with the original suspension were sold to the public: many, though not all, had their front suspension set-up retrospectively corrected by dealers and before September 1971, less than six months after launch, front-suspension "uprights" were being modified on the production line. The Marina was never intended, or designed, to have particularly exciting or sharp handling, but the early problems led to less-than-flattering road-test reports and it was undeniable that the Marina's handling always tended towards understeer, which for a rear-wheel-drive car was unusual, and towards body-roll. What Car? magazine, in a typical review, described the understeer as "noticeable", but called the car as a whole "unobtrusively well designed".
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