The best road test ever....Rover 2000 1966

[STUNO]

Originally published in Road And Track in 1966

 

A test driver from the Rover experimental dept had been driving around the English countryside all day in a Rover 2000 "mileage" car. This kind of testing on public roads is fundamental to search for any weak points in the design. The car is loaded with sandbags to simulate the weight of 3 passengers and the boot loaded for luggage for four.

The driver had been at MIRA that day and was late, so took the car home.

However he had the energy after a meal to collect a friend for a drive in the countryside, an event not fully covered by his job description.

10:05 on a pleasant June evening saw them approaching a small town called Reddich on a well surfaced but narrow road. The driver knew the road well but seems to have forgotten about a narrow humpbacked bridge, resembling a ski jump.

Later our test driver estimated his speed at this point at approx. 50 mph, but it is thought that he erred on the side of modesty and the true figure was nearly twice his estimate.When the car ascended the approach to the bridge , it just went on ascending and did not touch tyhe ground again for 164 feet.

Not surprisingly, some loss of directional stability was experienced in the course of this manoeuver, a condition not much improved by the pronounced nose-down attitude developed during flight.

The landing must have been somewhat tricky in that it left a couple of tyre scrub marks on the roadway equivalent to thw track width of the vehicle and also a sharply defined groove from a wheel rim.

A few feet further along, problems of control were heightened by the fact that the front left wheel dropped into a short deep gully at the margin of the road. It is difficult to assess the degree to which our test driver was dictating the course of events at this juncture but the skid marks clearly indicated that the car executed a somewhat lurid swerve across the road and back again in the course of covering the next 323 feet, at the end of which it struck an unusually high kerbstone at the corner of an entry to a garage.This particular corner was also obstructed by a concrete post marking a bus stop and an intending lady passenger waiting beside it.

Some 100 feet further on, our 2000, still intact and containing two increasingly apprehensive occupants and still posessed of considerable momentum, encountered a wooden post. The post was hit by the left rear of the car, ripped out of the ground and flung 60 feet into a field.

Bouncing back onto the roadway, the car travelled a further 70 feet before it came upon a more substantial object - a tree. Again the impact was taken by the left side, this time just in front of the rear wheel, indenting the structure deeply and ripping off both doors. This was the first time the car shed any of its component parts. It also turned end over end detaching the complete left front suspension unit in the process.

Shortly it came to rest on its roof in the middle of the road, having travelled the hard way a distance of 748 feet from the point of take-off at the bridge.

The test driver and his friend stayed at their posts to the end, however they managed to stagger forth shaken but intact.

They found that they had fortuitously chosen for their landing point a piece of roadway immediatly in front of the Reddich police station, so the least possible time was wasted in recording the official details of this somewhat spectacular test.

The test driver is still a valued employee of Rover, he has however been transferred from experimental testing to inspection.

[midnite]

truly truly the good old days.

[Sigmund Fraud]

Being a test driver must have been the best job in the world back then...

 

Nowadays I bet it involves little more than driving endless NEDC cycles and ticking endless boxes on pointless forms.

[Pillock]

I think when JLR were advertising for test drivers, one of the necessary skills was being able to use Microsoft Excel.

 

Says a lot.

[MarvinsMom]

i launched a mark 2 ford focus over a hunched back bridge once, when it landed the airbags went off and all i could see was white, from the talc that is in the airbags....

 

wrote the fucker off in the process cos as well as the airbags, which would be enough to kill it, i smashed the gearbox to bits too. oops.....

 

still the two deep gouges in the road surface are at least a foot further forward compared with all the others. or they were, assuming that they are still there.

[Asimo]

I have a very clear memory of two pre production Rover SD1, on the B 4421 near the end of the M50. My Dad's Farina Riley couldn't compete, they were going like hell! I had never seen one before for real but knew what they were because of CAR magazine. Must have been a few months before the launch.

 

Good work if you can get it!

[garethj]

The good old days are still here. Only a few months ago someone test driving a powerful car underestimated the help of traction control, a shame as he'd turned it off.

 

Accelerating hard out of a T junction the rear wheels were spinning as he turned right, ahead of a car driving down the major road towards him. Being inexperienced he kept his foot in, the rear wheels kept spinning and instead of turning 90 degrees it became more like 180.

 

That was the point the car on the major road drew level and he managed to put the front of his car into the right rear of the other car, knocking it off course into a ditch where both cars ended up.

 

The real problem started when the driver got out, explained it was a development car from the factory and he was very sorry. The driver of the other car explained that her husband was a very senior manager in that company and any thoughts of hushing it up were in the same state as the car's front bumper - smashed into a million pieces and abandoned in a ditch, coincidentally the same condition as the lad's career

[rml2345]

At least the Rover bod managed to keep his job. In saying that, as the only guy to have ever flown a P6 he probably had a unique contribution to the development of the car.

[NorfolkNWeigh]

The description of the calm inside the out of control P6 , reminds me of an incident in 1981'in my mate Mark's 1969 P6b.

At about 11.00 pm on a Sunday night 4 up in an enthusiastically driven Rover Three Thousand Five, the road between Bedford and Newport Pagnell was, and indeed still is , perfect for a big fast saloon car, wide smooth , with long well sighted bends. Even in the hands of it's 19 year old owner the Rover felt rock solid and safe at 90+ , as we whizzed towards home after an evening in the pub. The occaisional dawdler swiftly despatched , the big solid trees flew past the windows in a blur .

At the village of Chichley you take a left turn and down a long straight hill about a mile long , it's always been part of the Aston Martin factory test route,and apocryphal tales of been passed by a V8 Vantage doing 170 were quite common, I myself once experienced a Virage 600 thing put me down going up the hill flat out in a 24v Scorpio.

But I digress, back to our wannabe thrusting young execs in a prime red P6.

These days it's a dual carriageway but in 1982 it was effectively one half of the dual carriageway with a massive verge in preparation of dialling it in the future. This is very pertinent and possibly one reason I'm here today.

Halfway down the hill at an indicated 110, our dashing pilote overtakes a Bejam artic, even at that speed he had to pull back in quite sharply to avoid a car coming the other way( did I mention the 6 pints of Flowers that made me so confident and relaxed in Mark's driving?)

Anyway there was a bang and suddenly I could see the Bejam lorries headlights then a lot of mud then lights then small saplings flying up the bonnet , this repeated about 6 or 7 times before we came to a halt.

The silence in the car was shattered by the lorry driver triumphantly beeping his horn as he passed us sitting sill deep in the mud.

When we returned the next morning to recover themP6 with my V8 S2 Land Rover, we discovered an o/s/r puncture had caused the minor off. The cause? The suspension pulling out of the rotten boot floor and ripping into the inner sidewall- a neat design feature ,I thought.

The boot floor was welded and the Rover lived on for another couple of years.

[Mr A Lawrence]

Picture the scene......

 

Early 90's.

 

22 ish invincible me, rover sd1 '79 T reg 2.3.

 

Leaving Rothwell motor auctions south of Leeds.

 

Humpback bridge in a now heavily redeveloped area.

 

40mph limit, me doing 70mph, not concentrating.

 

Hit the bridge and took off, landing involved both front door cards coming off, both glove boxes opening and the radio coming out.

 

The car probably weighed a few kilos less judging by the amount of rust left on the road!!

[Guest Lord Sward]

Cracking thread.

[The Reverend Bluejeans]

1988, driving a 1977 Escort 1100 Estate - Midnight blue (colour changed by me from Royal blue). Took the hump backed bridge coming into Islip from Charlton On Otmoor about 50 ish, landed with a bang and both front strut tops gave up. Had to crawl back to base with the car looking like a dragster, jack it up under the crossmember (not WCXM lol) and beat the struts back down before welding some repair plates on.  For the 1 mile trip back, the bonnet was actually a structural part of the car.

[mercrocker]

Not a road test story, but a test drive story. Didn't involve me, either, but related by an old friend of mine (I'll call him Ted) who was prone to "things happening" and who possessed an extremely dry manner of vocal delivery which I cannot unfortunately replicate on a keyboard...

 

Said friend takes daughter to local BMW dealership to test-drive a Bini. He prepared to wait a respectful distance away from theshowroom in his rather tired Mk2 Mondeo and started reading the paper. Before long an earnest young salesman with black suit, pointy brown shoes and pointy brown hair was tapping on his window. "Would sir like to test drive a new BMW whilst he was waiting?"

 

Ted pointed out he had no wish to do anything of the sort, he didn't aspire to BMW ownership, was only waiting for his daughter and was not at ease driving other cars in any case. All perfectly true, knowing him as I did. However, Pointy was having none of it and seized on a variation of his tactic.

 

"In that case, sir, you might be interested in this 3 Series Compact - guaranteed used BMW. It has just gone out of production but we can offer a marvellous deal on it and that would included generous allowance on your um, current, vehicle" he gushed, punctuating the last bit with a barely concealed raising of eyebrows at the bumper tape.

 

Faced with the reality that he was unlikely to get past the TV page, Ted folded the Daily Mirror and unenthusiastically shuffled over to the Compact. Protesting that he had "not much time" and didn't want to "go too far" he took the driving seat. Pointy went into talking-brochure mode through all the features before motioning for Ted to pull away. Unfortunately Ted was never fond of automatics and is even less so now. Suffice to say that at a critical point in emerging from the parallel parking line outside the Service Reception area a heavy right foot landed, instead of on the brake pedal, flat down on the throttle.

 

Said Compact was now buried in the back of a recently PDI'd 5 Series amidst the ominous drip-drip of a smashed cooling system - just as another Pointy emerged from a side door clutching the document folder for the Compact which he had just sold to a couple who had been sat in the reception area and watched the whole ghastly episode unfold in showroom glazing Panavision.

 

At that moment daughter returned in the Bini to the, admittedly not unusual, sight of Ted stroking his chin surrounded by absolute carnage and confusion. She didn't buy a Bini, either....