It was Britain's most mis-understood hot hatch, and has a cult following today...
KEVIN DAVIS rummarges through his archive and discusses one of his pet subjects - the Rover 200 BRM LE.
Formula None
HIS imaginative advert for the Rover
200BRM LE appeared in only one issue of Top Gear magazine in late 1998, and
we all know what a tin of Spinach did to the popular cartoon character, Popeye.
Certainly the connection was spot on.
The Rover 200vi had previously carried the chequered flag for the 200 Series but Rover had wanted a halo model for the range along the lines of the limited edition Renault Clio Williams, which had been so successful for Renault that demand outstripped supply, so Rover thought it too could place a bit of Formula One magic into the 200 range.
Scraping the barrel for a suitable moniker for the car Rover’s marketing men found that Rover’s only link with F1 was a very tenacious dabble with British Racing Motors using a gas turbine engine at Le Mans in the Sixties. It wasn’t an outright success, but it was memorable for its ingenuity nevertheless, and the two names – Rover-BRM - became tenaciously linked. Thirty years later Rover decided to use the BRM brand for their new, no holds barred sporting hatch.
The 200BRM was developed from the outset as a sporting Grand Tourer and much time was spent tuning the chassis and suspension, with the final compromise being just about spot on, Unfortunately a mixed reaction from the press along with some slightly misjudged packaging, a high £18,000 asking price and virtually no marketing support saw the 200BRM quickly forgotten, and it took Rover some four years and several price reductions to shift the 795 built for the UK. Now, the 200BRM has become a motoring oddity and, unlike the revered Renault Clio Williams, hardly anyone really knows what it was all about.
Perhaps now a Viagra pill should replace the Spinach tin; the 200BRM kept the marketing men at Rover up for a few nights.
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Please let us know your thoughts - and let us know what you think of the BRM's advertising campaign.
ROVER'S BRM connection
wasn’t ‘tenuous’ or ‘tenacious’ it was based on
a world’s first. In 1950, Rover ‘JET1’ was the world’s
first gas turbine car. The Rover BRMs were a showcase to Rover’s new marketing
in the 1960s to grasp a younger customer. The Rover BRM was based on its automotive
2S160 turbine engine previously demonstrated in the Rover T4 shown at the 1961
Earls Court Motor Show. Combined with rallying P6s and P5s, the volte-face from
Auntie Rover to dynamic 1960s Rover was a huge success.
In 1963, The Rover BRM entered the Le Mans 24 hour as the world’s first gas turbine racing car, beating the STP Indy Car & Lotus F1 car by several years. It was driven by none less than Graham Hill and Richie Ginther. It was unclassified, entered as ‘00’ and if classified finished in 7th place as the highest placed British finisher. In 1965, it was entered again driven by Graham Hill and Jackie Stewart and finished 3rd in class and overall 10th.
On marketing what is ‘hot’, what better than showing some of the Le Mans footage and T4 which is still a fully working saloon and it’s upstart 200 BRM having a go round the track? Rover did ‘hot’ all through the ‘60s and ‘70s. I never understood why Rover never played more on its gas turbine heritage of which it had a unique and very rich history.
MICHAEL THOMAS
THE Rover BRM
was so ill timed with the facelifted 25 and its sportier looking MG ZR just
around the corner, surely if the product planners hadn’t thought of this
derivative earlier, they should have saved the money.
Perhaps if the 2004 facelifted fascias had gone into the the 25s & 45s from the offset, this might just have staved off their reputation for being long in the tooth long enough for replacements to come out thanks to money saved by this model. (With a little help from the Austin 3 Litre’s spriritua successor, the Rover V8, and also the MG X-power QV.) The latter, if a little harshly condemned as De Tomaso’s cast-off, which actually was actually over-developed in my opinion with an attractive looking large coupe in 2001 become a monstrosity by the time of its launch.
PHILIP SIMPSON