The Morris Marina is a small family car that was manufactured by the Austin-Morris division of British Leyland (BL) from 1971 until 1980. It served to replace both the Morris Minor and Morris Oxford in the Morris product line. The Marina was also sold in some markets as the Austin Marina,Morris Marina/Ital : The Austins, www.aronline.co.uk Retrieved on 22 June 2013 the Leyland Marina and the Morris 1700. It has a front-engine, rear-wheel-drive layout and was produced with saloon car, estate car, coupé, pickup truck, and van body styles.
It was a popular car in Britain throughout its production life, although it rarely came close to challenging its main rival, the Ford Cortina. The car was exported throughout the world, including North America, and assembled in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Malaysia. A total of 1.2 million were built.
According to various sources, the Marina ranks among the worst cars ever built.
The 1980 replacement for the Marina, the Ital, was the same car with only mild styling changes. It was only fully replaced by the Austin Montego in 1984.
British Leyland sold the Marina alongside the 1969 Austin Maxi, which shared the same market segment but used front-wheel-drive and had a hatchback body, and the 1973 Austin Allegro, which used front-wheel-drive and more adventurous styling.
Development
The Marina was developed under the ADO28 codename. The impetus for its development came when truck and bus builder (along with the Triumph and Rover cars) 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, the Austin Cambridge/Morris Oxford 'Farina' series launched in 1959, and the 1100/1300 range of mid-sized Austin and Morris saloons that were already a decade old. BL rapidly implemented a plan to develop a replacement for both the Minor and the 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. Specifically, this meant that Austins used the groundbreaking transverse-engine front-wheel-drive layout developed for the Austin Mini by Alec Issigonis. It was thus decided that the ADO28 would be badged as a Morris.
The Marina 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, Ford Cortina 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 existing BMC and Triumph Motor Company components from their extensive parts bins.
The car was designed by Roy Haynes, the same man who designed the Ford Cortina Mark II (launched in 1966), with which it shares stylistic similarities and dimensions. Lacking the budget to develop two cars to compete directly with the Escort and the Cortina, the makers sized the ADO28 to compete with both, although the Marina ended up being only marginally smaller than the Ford Cortina Mark II. 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. Harris Mann, Haynes' assistant, designed the door handles, which he would later copy for the Austin Allegro and Triumph TR7.
Haynes also attempted to put forward a system that many manufacturers now use: a common floor pan 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, and Harris Mann replaced him as chief designer.
The British Leyland Board decided to build the Marina at the ex-Morris Motors plant at Cowley in Oxford, which was largely still as it was in 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 overhead cam 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.
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. It was less confusing with the saloons; the 1.3-litre saloon replaced the 4-door Minor, 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. An estate (station wagon) came in 1972, 18 months after the saloon and coupé. Five body styles were available all in all: saloon, estate, coupé, pickup, and van. 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.
Launch and subsequent updates
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 until 1980, when it was replaced by the Morris Ital (an updated version of the Marina) which soldiered on 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 non-commercial 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 facelifted O-Series form) and in North America as the Austin Marina.