British Leyland: a source of jokes for Fawlty Towers, Private Eye and anyone searching for a symbol of Failing Britain in the 1970s. Yet BL was also, briefly, the second-biggest car company outside the US. But while chronic funding problems, disastrous industrial relations and dubious quality control undermined it, that didn’t stop some interesting machines emerging, several of them legends, before the BL name died in 1986.
RICHARD BREMNER