A very long post from me, I hope RRers might enjoy a recent roadtrip I did, "Harris Mann(k) to Casablanca" was a one-way roadtrip and an excuse for me to buy the pith helmet I always wanted. The story below is taken from my blog of similar adventures. More here www.motorpunk.co.uk/features/roadtripping/harris-mannk-casablanca-experiment-rover-reliability/
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Harris Mann was in control of the felt-tips at BL during it’s most turbulent time and, to be fair to the poor chap, he could have designed a bucket of p!ss and the assembly line would have struggled to produce anything more than wet shoes. He worked on designs like the Metro, Maestro and the 416. These cars were the mainstay of family motoring in the ‘80s and ‘90s and did have some nice touches, yet, if you believe the entire motoring media today, were thoroughly wretched things. I had successfully avoided owning anything BLish in my entire life until very recently when I decided to see if Rover’s reputation for rubbishness was deserved and found myself collecting a Metro 1.1 Quest from a back street garage in Nottingham. I was greeted with “you do know these are sh!t, don’t you?”, paid £300 and hid it in the yard at work while I devised an experiment to find out for myself.
Manufacturers use rallying to test the reliability of their products and Formula 1 is considered the technical pinnacle of motorsport. But where can we try that, for a budget of peanuts, and where the law won’t disturb our automotive experiment? A meeting with some like-minded motoring masochists in the pub, armed with a primary school world map and too much booze, and we hatched a plan – Harris Mann(k) to Casablanca. A one-way roadtrip to the dark continent, rallying across northern Morocco and then a few laps of the 1958 Casablanca Grand Prix circuit before disposing of the cars and flying back to blighty. Our Metro was joined by a Rover 416, the fruit of Rover’s brief fling with Honda, and a four-wheeled freak of a thing called a Ledbury Maestro. Each car would have two drivers, we’d cross Europe and North Africa and finish in Rick’s Café in Casablanca to analyse the results. What better way to test Harris Mann’s creations?
Setting off at “half past b*stard o’clock” in the morning Darryl and I ragged down to Portsmouth in the Metro to meet Baz and Jimbo in their Maestro and Ben and Chas in their 416, boarded the ferry to Spain, and spent 24 hours clinging to the bar, playing Bingo and feeling smug because we hadn’t had to cross any Fr*nch speaking parts of the continent. The nautical shortcut across Bay of Biscay was stormy yet I wasn’t bothered that I hadn’t put the handbrake on the Metro – these cars were not coming back. I have an almost religious approach to prepping cars for trips like this – if you replace just one rusty washer, you have to replace the nut, and then whatever it’s holding, ad infinitum until you’ve done a full resto job. Changing one scabby connector upsets old wires and creaking circuits, setting off an endless chain of catastrophic maladies on a worthless car. I call it mechanical karma. Leave it all alone. They’ve managed 20 years and only need last a thousand miles more. We spent the maintenance budget on stickers because stickers = rallycar.
Spain was the easy part of the trip. 24 hours of motorway to get down to the port in Algeciras for the crossing to Africa, a steady drive for the cars with a healthy supply of crisps and brandy to get us there. Yet at the first hill coming out of Santander the Maestro overheated and broke down. It was the first time I had chance to look at the thing. When Rover stopped making the Maestro they sold unused parts to a company in Bulgaria who bodged a few together. Unsurprisingly, they didn’t make as many as planned and sold leftover bits back to a company in Ledbury who assembled the car and sold it buyers in the UK who wanted an ancient design with a KPH speedo, wrong-way wipers, Ox-cart comfort and an ancient 1275cc A-series engine. They are, supposedly, rare and collectable now. The overheating was traced to coolant that had never been changed so we emptied the slurry from the rad, topped it up and went on our way. Driver Baz normally enjoys a Merc C63 so when he screamed over the radio “slow down! It’s kn*ckered! It has no power!” no-one had any sympathy, not even startled Spanish traffic cops on the same frequency as our walkie talkies. ¡Hola, amigos!
We arrived very late for the departure of the ferry to Morocco. Fortunately the ferry was very very late and we made it in the nick of time. We waved goodbye to Europe and crossed the strait of Gibraltar, arriving in Tangier, a few miles from Europe geographically but as far removed from civilisation as an overheating Maestro is from being acceptable intercontinental transport. Angry men in ill-fitting uniforms with guns shouted at us in Fr*nch while locals grabbed, hassled and got in the way. To get into Morocco you have to complete a form to import yourself, another form to import your car, buy insurance for the car, then buy local currency which we called “stinkies”, Moroccan currency cannot be bought outside the country. Much of the paperwork is in foreign (Arabic, anyone?) it’s hot, late, and there’s a jostling scrum of aggressively friendly locals clawing at your passport and wallet. Still, we’d made it to Morocco and headed south for an overnight stay in what the internet had assured us was a clean, safe and friendly place just south of Tangier called Asilah. The internet was wrong.
The Hotel owner spoke English so Daz and I got a large 4 bed, 2 roomed apartment for just £30. He was quite friendly until it came to being seen with us in public. He poked his head out the door to first ensure it was safe before directing us to a nearby cat-infested restaurant for tagines, chips and olives. The cars were locked in a compound, next to a dead Renault 5 and a British registered Merc G-wagon that looked utterly kaput and the rain came down. Leaving Asilah in the morning after having been rudely awoken by the call to prayer we aimed to avoid the coastal motorway and give the cars a ragging on the old road that ran parallel to it. These roads are potholed, have crazy subsidence in places and the rain teemed down. We got lost. The Maestro conked out in an open sewer and as Baz was attempting to google “Rover specialist near الشارعالقرف أصيلة” it thankfully sprang back to life. Traffic is sparse on the open road but there is an incredible jumble of transport to be avoided in the towns. Motorbikes converted to pick-up trucks seemed popular, as well as Renault 4s and 5s, Peugeot 205s which also serve as taxis and smoky old Merc saloons with up to half a dozen people rammed in the back, all spewing pollution you could collect in a jar and sell as Moroccan marmite. Our cars, though, were holding up surprisingly well.
I’m not sure what I liked most about the Metro. It’s incredible fuel economy, the boingy handling or the fact that we could drive it across Africa without worrying about the inevitable scrapes and scuffs suffered along the way. The hydragas was saggy and the brake warning light was on, but “they all do that, Sir”. Owning a worthless Rover is fun. Ramming another worthless Rover at every opportunity in heavy traffic more so. The 416’s back bumper took a dozen shunts to dislodge, but it isn’t a Rover in the darkest, Longbridgist, Leylandist sense of the word. It’s a boggo Honda with wood cappings, velour seats and an automatic gearbox, first owned by a Doctor who paid more for the Nightfire Red paint option when new than Ben and Chas paid for the complete car. £180 gets you a reliable and comfortable car that, apart from vandalism by our fellow experimentalists and the word ‘TW@T’ inexplicably embroidered on a headrest by the previous owner, worked perfectly. Aside from the overheating A-series in the Maestro all the cars were fine, if a bit battered, by the time we reached Casablanca.
Stirling Moss won the Casablanca grand prix in 1958, a race organised by the King of Morocco to showcase his country; it’s a blast down the coast road south of the city centre then a rough left, left, left, left square back to the start. No faded Reims-style beauty here nor Monaguesque opulence, the site of the original pit lane is now a KFC. The city is overcrowded and chaotic. Traffic is horrific. Think Paris rush hour on crack with a blinkered population of 5 million, driving carts pulled by emaciated mules, overloaded lorries, smokey Mercs, mopeds and old Fr*nch hatchbacks. Weirdly we also saw a Rover 820 and a 618 but this is no place for a race. We dumped the cars and took a taxi to dinner, whereupon our driver ran over a couple attempting to cross the road, backed up to get them from under his front wheels, then eventually dropped us at Rick’s Café. Of all the gin joints in all the world, why did we walk into this one? Rick’s is brilliant. It’s a bar and restaurant carbon-copied from the film Casablanca, run by an American ex-diplomat who serves the most fantastic food, cold beer and obligatory G&Ts. The décor is colonial splendor with Arab touches and a Sam on piano. It’s beautiful and a complete contrast to the hell-hole just outside the door. I was hoping for the company of Ingrid Bergmann but got half a dozen Rover owning Brits in flat caps and pith helmets arguing the toss about their cars.
Time to rate our rides. The most BL of the lot was the Maestro. I know that some readers will be unhappy that Darryl stoved in it’s doors, roof, boot and bonnet with a golf club when it overheated for the 6th time but these cars, as rare as they now are, are worthless. If it was so special why could we pick one up for the price of a few drinks at Rick’s? We could only blame it’s unreliability on poor maintenance and the fact that Baz had tried to V max it at every opportunity. I think Jimbo had bonded with it but like a holiday romance it had to end. Ben and Chas had played a kind of BL Buckaroo with their 416 by removing as many parts as possible as they went along, arriving in Casa without most of it’s trim and superfluous components, but it got there, no fuss. The Metro had just 41k on the clock and had been well maintained by a Nottingham pensioner, but watching a wing burst open like a bit of wet cardboard after a little collision with [removed in case their insurer is reading this] we decided that it needs about 200 Kg of strengthening to make it safe, which would cripple the lightweight, chuckable feel that made it so much fun in the first place. These cars might be a bit cr*p but we loved them and I’d like to think that Harris Mann would approve of our fun and games.
Lots more pics here: www.motorpunk.co.uk/features/roadtripping/harris-mannk-casablanca-experiment-rover-reliability/
Thanks for reading
--------------------------------------------------------------
Harris Mann was in control of the felt-tips at BL during it’s most turbulent time and, to be fair to the poor chap, he could have designed a bucket of p!ss and the assembly line would have struggled to produce anything more than wet shoes. He worked on designs like the Metro, Maestro and the 416. These cars were the mainstay of family motoring in the ‘80s and ‘90s and did have some nice touches, yet, if you believe the entire motoring media today, were thoroughly wretched things. I had successfully avoided owning anything BLish in my entire life until very recently when I decided to see if Rover’s reputation for rubbishness was deserved and found myself collecting a Metro 1.1 Quest from a back street garage in Nottingham. I was greeted with “you do know these are sh!t, don’t you?”, paid £300 and hid it in the yard at work while I devised an experiment to find out for myself.
Manufacturers use rallying to test the reliability of their products and Formula 1 is considered the technical pinnacle of motorsport. But where can we try that, for a budget of peanuts, and where the law won’t disturb our automotive experiment? A meeting with some like-minded motoring masochists in the pub, armed with a primary school world map and too much booze, and we hatched a plan – Harris Mann(k) to Casablanca. A one-way roadtrip to the dark continent, rallying across northern Morocco and then a few laps of the 1958 Casablanca Grand Prix circuit before disposing of the cars and flying back to blighty. Our Metro was joined by a Rover 416, the fruit of Rover’s brief fling with Honda, and a four-wheeled freak of a thing called a Ledbury Maestro. Each car would have two drivers, we’d cross Europe and North Africa and finish in Rick’s Café in Casablanca to analyse the results. What better way to test Harris Mann’s creations?
Setting off at “half past b*stard o’clock” in the morning Darryl and I ragged down to Portsmouth in the Metro to meet Baz and Jimbo in their Maestro and Ben and Chas in their 416, boarded the ferry to Spain, and spent 24 hours clinging to the bar, playing Bingo and feeling smug because we hadn’t had to cross any Fr*nch speaking parts of the continent. The nautical shortcut across Bay of Biscay was stormy yet I wasn’t bothered that I hadn’t put the handbrake on the Metro – these cars were not coming back. I have an almost religious approach to prepping cars for trips like this – if you replace just one rusty washer, you have to replace the nut, and then whatever it’s holding, ad infinitum until you’ve done a full resto job. Changing one scabby connector upsets old wires and creaking circuits, setting off an endless chain of catastrophic maladies on a worthless car. I call it mechanical karma. Leave it all alone. They’ve managed 20 years and only need last a thousand miles more. We spent the maintenance budget on stickers because stickers = rallycar.
Spain was the easy part of the trip. 24 hours of motorway to get down to the port in Algeciras for the crossing to Africa, a steady drive for the cars with a healthy supply of crisps and brandy to get us there. Yet at the first hill coming out of Santander the Maestro overheated and broke down. It was the first time I had chance to look at the thing. When Rover stopped making the Maestro they sold unused parts to a company in Bulgaria who bodged a few together. Unsurprisingly, they didn’t make as many as planned and sold leftover bits back to a company in Ledbury who assembled the car and sold it buyers in the UK who wanted an ancient design with a KPH speedo, wrong-way wipers, Ox-cart comfort and an ancient 1275cc A-series engine. They are, supposedly, rare and collectable now. The overheating was traced to coolant that had never been changed so we emptied the slurry from the rad, topped it up and went on our way. Driver Baz normally enjoys a Merc C63 so when he screamed over the radio “slow down! It’s kn*ckered! It has no power!” no-one had any sympathy, not even startled Spanish traffic cops on the same frequency as our walkie talkies. ¡Hola, amigos!
We arrived very late for the departure of the ferry to Morocco. Fortunately the ferry was very very late and we made it in the nick of time. We waved goodbye to Europe and crossed the strait of Gibraltar, arriving in Tangier, a few miles from Europe geographically but as far removed from civilisation as an overheating Maestro is from being acceptable intercontinental transport. Angry men in ill-fitting uniforms with guns shouted at us in Fr*nch while locals grabbed, hassled and got in the way. To get into Morocco you have to complete a form to import yourself, another form to import your car, buy insurance for the car, then buy local currency which we called “stinkies”, Moroccan currency cannot be bought outside the country. Much of the paperwork is in foreign (Arabic, anyone?) it’s hot, late, and there’s a jostling scrum of aggressively friendly locals clawing at your passport and wallet. Still, we’d made it to Morocco and headed south for an overnight stay in what the internet had assured us was a clean, safe and friendly place just south of Tangier called Asilah. The internet was wrong.
The Hotel owner spoke English so Daz and I got a large 4 bed, 2 roomed apartment for just £30. He was quite friendly until it came to being seen with us in public. He poked his head out the door to first ensure it was safe before directing us to a nearby cat-infested restaurant for tagines, chips and olives. The cars were locked in a compound, next to a dead Renault 5 and a British registered Merc G-wagon that looked utterly kaput and the rain came down. Leaving Asilah in the morning after having been rudely awoken by the call to prayer we aimed to avoid the coastal motorway and give the cars a ragging on the old road that ran parallel to it. These roads are potholed, have crazy subsidence in places and the rain teemed down. We got lost. The Maestro conked out in an open sewer and as Baz was attempting to google “Rover specialist near الشارعالقرف أصيلة” it thankfully sprang back to life. Traffic is sparse on the open road but there is an incredible jumble of transport to be avoided in the towns. Motorbikes converted to pick-up trucks seemed popular, as well as Renault 4s and 5s, Peugeot 205s which also serve as taxis and smoky old Merc saloons with up to half a dozen people rammed in the back, all spewing pollution you could collect in a jar and sell as Moroccan marmite. Our cars, though, were holding up surprisingly well.
I’m not sure what I liked most about the Metro. It’s incredible fuel economy, the boingy handling or the fact that we could drive it across Africa without worrying about the inevitable scrapes and scuffs suffered along the way. The hydragas was saggy and the brake warning light was on, but “they all do that, Sir”. Owning a worthless Rover is fun. Ramming another worthless Rover at every opportunity in heavy traffic more so. The 416’s back bumper took a dozen shunts to dislodge, but it isn’t a Rover in the darkest, Longbridgist, Leylandist sense of the word. It’s a boggo Honda with wood cappings, velour seats and an automatic gearbox, first owned by a Doctor who paid more for the Nightfire Red paint option when new than Ben and Chas paid for the complete car. £180 gets you a reliable and comfortable car that, apart from vandalism by our fellow experimentalists and the word ‘TW@T’ inexplicably embroidered on a headrest by the previous owner, worked perfectly. Aside from the overheating A-series in the Maestro all the cars were fine, if a bit battered, by the time we reached Casablanca.
Stirling Moss won the Casablanca grand prix in 1958, a race organised by the King of Morocco to showcase his country; it’s a blast down the coast road south of the city centre then a rough left, left, left, left square back to the start. No faded Reims-style beauty here nor Monaguesque opulence, the site of the original pit lane is now a KFC. The city is overcrowded and chaotic. Traffic is horrific. Think Paris rush hour on crack with a blinkered population of 5 million, driving carts pulled by emaciated mules, overloaded lorries, smokey Mercs, mopeds and old Fr*nch hatchbacks. Weirdly we also saw a Rover 820 and a 618 but this is no place for a race. We dumped the cars and took a taxi to dinner, whereupon our driver ran over a couple attempting to cross the road, backed up to get them from under his front wheels, then eventually dropped us at Rick’s Café. Of all the gin joints in all the world, why did we walk into this one? Rick’s is brilliant. It’s a bar and restaurant carbon-copied from the film Casablanca, run by an American ex-diplomat who serves the most fantastic food, cold beer and obligatory G&Ts. The décor is colonial splendor with Arab touches and a Sam on piano. It’s beautiful and a complete contrast to the hell-hole just outside the door. I was hoping for the company of Ingrid Bergmann but got half a dozen Rover owning Brits in flat caps and pith helmets arguing the toss about their cars.
Time to rate our rides. The most BL of the lot was the Maestro. I know that some readers will be unhappy that Darryl stoved in it’s doors, roof, boot and bonnet with a golf club when it overheated for the 6th time but these cars, as rare as they now are, are worthless. If it was so special why could we pick one up for the price of a few drinks at Rick’s? We could only blame it’s unreliability on poor maintenance and the fact that Baz had tried to V max it at every opportunity. I think Jimbo had bonded with it but like a holiday romance it had to end. Ben and Chas had played a kind of BL Buckaroo with their 416 by removing as many parts as possible as they went along, arriving in Casa without most of it’s trim and superfluous components, but it got there, no fuss. The Metro had just 41k on the clock and had been well maintained by a Nottingham pensioner, but watching a wing burst open like a bit of wet cardboard after a little collision with [removed in case their insurer is reading this] we decided that it needs about 200 Kg of strengthening to make it safe, which would cripple the lightweight, chuckable feel that made it so much fun in the first place. These cars might be a bit cr*p but we loved them and I’d like to think that Harris Mann would approve of our fun and games.
Lots more pics here: www.motorpunk.co.uk/features/roadtripping/harris-mannk-casablanca-experiment-rover-reliability/
Thanks for reading
