Vintage Thing 23.1 - Austin Allegro Equipe

Sad that this very rare car got so far down the restoration path but then progress faltered. At least it got moved on to someone who might get it together properly.

I spotted this on eBay yesterday -- it sold today for £300. The Austin Allegro Equipe is the rarest of all Austin Allegro production variants and earned notoriety as being the Allegro that had "Vroom!" As far as I know they were all in the silver and featured a rather fetching go faster stripe in orange and red. All Allegro Equipes had the 1750 cc engine and five-speed box. Those alloy wheels you see were also unique to the car. I have no idea how many Allegro Equipes were made but there can't be many survivors and I really hope this one has found a good home.

If ever an Allegro was to become collectable, the Equipe is the most likely. The Vanden Plas 1750 may be posh but it doesn't have "Vroom!" Forget about folding down picnic tables and a burr walnut dashboard that really is as good as that in a Rolls-Royce -- what you want is a car immortalised in probably one of the silliest adverts from the last century.

There's a chap driving his Austin Allegro Equipe down a road at night when a line of dancing girls draw level with him and threaten to overtake with their high kicks. He does the sensible thing and lets them get inside, whereupon they admire the trendy interior.

It's the interiors that make these cars so special. The seats for the Equipe (some people called them 'Eck Wipes) were unique to that model so these are real survivors.

The next thing you know, their boyfriends are catching up our man in the Allegro. Now I can't remember the music exactly, but there was a song along the lines of "change up to top" and then do something else. Anyway, Allegro man accelerates off with the girls, leaving the dancing boys of questionable sexual orientation trailing far behind.

Another advert for the Allegro featured The Two Ronnies but the one for the Allegro Equipe was straight out of the Carry On films.

This isn't a black and white shot - it's just  a very dusty engine bay. You get  a similar effect after hooning around around a disused Cornish china clay pit - allegedly. Look at those twin carbs!

On paper, the Austin Allegro Equipe made a lot of sense. British Leyland adopted the time-honoured technique of putting their biggest engine into their lightest body shell. Two-door Allegro's were bargain basement machines, usually endowed with 1100 or 1300 cc engines, but even then they could be hot-rodded. The 1750cc single overhead cam engine in the Allegro Equipe put out 90 brake horsepower at 5000 revs with SU carbs, enough to break the 12 second barrier in the 0 to 60 mph dash. The Allegro Equipe could have been the car to give the Allegro some sporting kudos and given the family man some performance, in the same way that the Triumph Dolomite Sprint had given to the other small Triumph saloons.

But, as with most things and Allegro, the execution left something to be desired.

At one stage, British Leyland seriously considered developing a coupe version of the Allegro to compete against the Ford Capri. Now, I know this sounds completely nuts but when you start to think about it, it makes a certain sense from a marketing point of view. Don't forget that the Ford Capri was offered with 1300 cc and 1600 cc four pot engines. Not everyone could afford to run the 2-litre or V6 versions and I imagine that the Austin Allegro Equipe could have embarrassed examples of the littler Capris in the hands of a spirited driver.

And this thought provokes another memory of mine from long ago. When I was at Falmouth School of Art, back in the early 80s, one of the more mature students had a 1600 Capri but he reckoned that his 1300 Allegro was a much better car. This may say more about the fine art students than the 1300 Allegro but Phil was deadly serious. probably by the time the Allegro Equipe hit the showrooms, British Leyland had thought better about comparisons with the Capri.

It's also possible that British Leyland felt that a hot Allegro could have been a threat to the more sporting saloons within their empire. this kind of inward paranoia was typical of the management at the time. The threat was always seemed to be from other badges within the manufacturing group and never from the French, the Germans or the Japanese.

I don't think British Leyland did anything to the suspension to the Equipe. Hydragas units can give a very good ride, when they are working properly (which in fairness they usually are), but a feature of this system is the lack of shock absorbers. That shouldn't make any difference but my Allegro 1300 Super can bounce all over the place if I'm not careful. I quite enjoy this sort of challenge but it probably wouldn't have impressed the girlies in the advert. Mini Metros had Hydragas suspension as well and I seem to remember an MG Metro racing formula that prompted the development of alternative Hydragas units more suited to competition use.

And then there was the small matter of the competition. Why have "Vroom!" when you could get a Golf GTi?

I think 300 quid for a piece of history like this was quite reasonable. It's got such potential but I suppose that could be the epitaph for the Austin Allegro Equipe -- it was always a car of tremendous unrealised potential.

The new panels may be unpainted and have a little surface rust but this little car is ripe for restoration and could give someone with an open mind and a dry workshop a lot of fun.

Many years ago, at a rally somewhere upcountry, I remember seeing an Austin Maxi 1750HLS with a British Leyland Special Tuning kit. The Maxi is a close relative to the Allegro so all these go faster goodies would've fitted the Equipe. I've no idea what sort of output these modifications would've achieved but 120bhp sounds ambitious and would probably have simply provoked clutch slip -- unless that was a Special Tuning part as well. Most British Leyland Special Tuning stuff was aimed at Minis and MGs, with their A and B series engines. It was good stuff, too, but I don't think that very much was offered for the E series engine, because that only powered the Maxi and the Allegro. An Allegro rally car was raced by the works that had a 1300 A series engine and was -- unsurprisingly -- slower than contemporary Minis.

Dig one of these kits out and fit it to this l'il baby and watch it fly! Nobody expects an old car to go well and for something with such a poor public image as the Allegro, making it perform really well could be incredibly satisfying.

There was a time when I was more interested in the cars than the girls. Now I'm more interested in the girls

I would very much like to see the "Vroom!" advert for the Austin Allegro Equipe. I even had a quick look on YouTube but couldn't find it. I hope someone posts it onto the Internet soon.