History
The development history of ADO28, the car that became the Morris Marina would do a modern-day soap story proud, with double-crosses, back-stabbing and infighting marring the work being done. At the end of it all appeared a car that could have given the Ford Escort and Cortina serious trouble in the sales charts and on the racetracks, but it was blown by political infighting. Instead was a car that was so close to being right but the details were wrong........read on and be surprised.
Morris Marina Mk1 Super 1.3 Coupe
Contrary to popular belief, the story of the Marina actually started with the arrival of Roy Haynes and some of his team of product strategists from Ford, bought in by Joe Edwards to try and correct the financial and product problems BMC (which soon became British Motor Holdings; we will refer to them as BMH from now on) was facing at the time. One of his first jobs was a minor restyle of the BMC Maxi and Mini Clubman. He then turned his team to the future range, and developed a ground-breaking strategy of using common floorpans across a range of vehicles, utilising different suspensions and drivelines. The idea was to get the costs of the main structure of the car as low as possible, then style the interior and exterior to suit. (The point is, VW utilise the same strategy to produce VW, Skoda and Seat cars today and Ford themselves to produce the Fiesta, Puma and Ka off one floorpan. This shows how far ahead Roy Haynes and his team were.) The vision was to develop a car to attack the growing fleet market head-on against Ford, Rootes and Vauxhall with a 'Cortina' sized unit using the multi-car platform as a base. This was the first step in the 'ten-year plan' put forward by Roy, which would have resulted in five basic floorpans for the whole BMH range by 1977. It was decided to go this route purely because BMH was totally out-gunned in the 'C' class cars with the ancient Farina A60/Morris Oxford, so the ADO28, later to become the Marina, was pushed fast into development. But, things were about to change....and not for the better.
The Merger
For reasons we will not go into here, a merger between Leyland Motors and BMH was put forward and enacted on January 1st 1968. The upshot of this was a power struggle between the ex-BMH design teams and Lord Stokes' team from Leyland ensued, not helped by the resignation of Joe Edwards shortly after the merger took place. The situation was this. Roy Haynes and his team were sat with a future product strategy based, to start with, with one chassis design but great plans for expansion across the range and on the other side, Lord Stokes with Harry Webster and his team from Leyland who had the parts but no real plans. Out of this could have come great things, but the Leyland team 'knew best' and over the coming months Roy Haynes was slowly pushed out, but not before he and Harris Mann had won the right to build their design of car, against stiff opposition from Harry Webster and his mates in Michelotti and a submission from Farina (which looked even more out-of-date than the Triumph Dolomite). Harry Webster had been given the project to re-skin the Morris Minor as a future contender and took the styling left by Haynes and Harris to which he bodged on a potch-potch of parts from the BMC and Leyland parts bin, apart from a 'new' gearbox cobbled together from Triumph parts which ended up being the Achilles Heel of the 1.8 engined cars, being too weak for the power and torque.