Just out of curiosity, were there any mid-engine Brit cars built?
Oh, a few. The first inexpensive production midengine car was the
Lotus Europa (introduced when, Phil?) And I think that sentence can
stand as written, since it predated the Fiat X 1/9 by a number of years.
Other more exotic British mid-engined cars include the Ford GT40,
the Jaguar prototype built in the early Sixties (can anyone remember
the call letters? It's the one that used a mid-mounted V12 engine,
they built one or two of them with the intention of getting back
into Le Mans, and then a factory fire destroyed the body bucks and
most of the tooling for them), literally thousands of formula cars
and sports-racers beginning with the Cooper-Norton mentioned in my
leaf-springs posting, and of course all the cars that will compete
in the Indianapolis 500 in about a month.
There were two very interesting mid-engined cars designed with mass-
production in mind. One of them, code-named WAEC, was a special built
by Geoff Healey and his crew out at The Cape. Using a 1275S Mini Cooper
engine and transaxle, this car stuck the power unit behind the driver,
gave it a sort of targa bar (like the X 1/9, 914, and others) for
rigidity and a removable canvas top for fun, and was considered as a
Sprite/Midget replacement in about 1965. Unfortunately, BMC management
at its best was scarcely better than BL management, so they cancelled
the project because -- get this, this one kills me -- "sports car owners
are too conservative to accept such a radical change." Idiots. Think
about running one of THOSE in F Production...
The other one was the Abingdon design intended to replace the MGB in
about 1972. This also used an off-the-shelf transverse four, in this
case the 1.8L O Series engine, notable for having an alloy cylinder
head with a cam in it. The transverse layout gave them automatic
independent rear suspension, the engine was in series production so
costs would have been reasonable; the body style looked like a cross
between a 904 Porsche and a Ferrari 308, with vestigial flying buttresses
at the rear and flat fold-up headlights. Once again, British Leyland
(by this time having replaced BMC) thought this too radical a departure
for the MG buying crowd, and due to some political manoeuvering the
"Bullet" from Triumph got the nod and we ended up with the TR-7.
It is perhaps worth remembering that while we praise the makers of our
favorite sports cars for their vision, an alternative word for people
who have visions is "schizophrenic."
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