Hi there

I'm guessing you all know the answer to this ........

Why the Clubman GT - was it due to BMC/Leyland falling out with John Cooper and wanting to avoid a royality for using his name on the cars?

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'62 Morris 850 (Marion)
'65 Mini Delux - sleeper 1275/S discs (Ms Plum)
'69 Vanden Plas Princess 1300
'71 Wolseley 1300
'74 Austin 1300 Countryman
'94 XJ6 Sport 3.2
'04 Rover 75 CDTi

There was an element of animosity between Cooper and Leyland but I think it was as much as royalties thing. They were pretty lean times with management at that time.

There was also the Gran Turismo marketing image that they wanted to share in. A slightly more sophisticated image than the decade old Cooper name.

Many reseaons:

- The British Leyland merger - cost cutting
- The dimise of the Competitions department
- The 2 pound royalty to John Cooper for very car built.
- The high insurance rating on the Cooper S

Remember, unlike the Oz GT, the U.K model lacked the performance of the Cooper S. The two models ran concurrently for 20 months in the UK due to the Cooper deal.

Lord Stokes was a wally... he said he wanted the mini modernised (clubman was designed), he canned the competition department (factory backed racing was canned, and Abingdon was turned into a service department) and he wanted the 2 pound per car royalty paid to Cooper for the use of the name...

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did I tell you that I won a trophy?

One of the problems was that the top management of Leyland was used to building trucks. They didn't know the car industry. The management of the combined car sections were all Triumph men.
Notice that within a couple of years of Leyland closing Zetland most of the cars they were trying to push in Australia were Triumphs. (Dolomite, 2500, Stag, TR7.)
They had a lot of companies building similar cars for similar markets.
Look at the MGB, MGC , Austin Healey 3000 and the TR6.
Common sense says that they had too many cars similar competing for the same market (the USA market) So what did they do? Kill the Austin Healey (and saved paying Donald Healey royalties similar to what they paid John Cooper) Killed the MGC, killed the MGB-GT-V8 (just when it was looking promising) and eventually killed the MGB.
What did they keep? Triumphs.

Sure they had to cut costs but the cuts always seemed to be in the direction of former BMC products.

They claimed that the Cooper name caused increased insurance costs but the GT name on anything also raised the costs.
This was why the Hillman Hunter GT had its name changed to the Hillman Hustler.

thank god the AFL Saved that...

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I love Triumph 2500s

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did I tell you that I won a trophy?

People keep getting stuck on personal preferences for the Cooper S (as opposed to the Clubman GT and 1275GT), dislike for Stokes for closing down ST Abingdon and 37 years worth of hindsight. In reality it was never that easy.

Firstly you can’t look at the Aussie Clubman GT and the UK 1275GT as the same beast. The Australian car was a “freak of nature” of sorts, never intended for true long-term production, created because BMC here had leftover Cooper S drive trains and equipment (amongst other reasons) it had the same insurance rating as the Cooper S.

The UK 1275GT on the other hand was a part of a regular line up; it had a clear place in the BLMC mini marketing plan for the next 20 odd years. It was the performance model in the new fashionable body shell (by the late 60s the round nose mini body shell was considered dated and boring). It had a detuned engine, shared with a bunch of other BLMC vehicles, which actually brought it down by several insurance ratings, and considering the apparent pennies made by BLMC from every mini produced the 1 pound saving on royalties to Cooper would have been pretty significant.

Secondly whatever might be thought today of the round nose being the actual classic, back when the clubby GT just appeared it was praised by reviewers and considered a smart and handsome improvement on the Cooper S. Vizard actually writes in his How to Modify your Mini “…my personal opinion is that the Clubman looks a smarter styled machine” (they did have interesting notions of style in the 70’s, just look at Vizards garish shirts in that book). The Ford Mustang too (just like the Corvette Stingray and so many US “performance” vehicles), experienced true sales success only when detuned and the classic body shape on it ruined.

Thirdly closing the competitions department and scratching outdated performance models when the company was bleeding money from the nose would have been the standard policy. The Comp department was already under funded and under performing by then, and the BLMC sports cars were becoming outdated and no funds available to modernise. Focusing on core bread and butter products might seem disastrous in hindsight but would have seem pretty reasonable back then. The world was entering the 70’s with constant instability in the Mid-East and rising oil prices, anything “performance” was seen as wasteful and negative.

thanks guys

pretty much confirmed what I'd assumed, there can only ever be one winner in any merger..... and in this case I guess ultimately no one won

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'62 Morris 850 (Marion)
'65 Mini Delux - sleeper 1275/S discs (Ms Plum)
'69 Vanden Plas Princess 1300
'71 Wolseley 1300
'74 Austin 1300 Countryman
'94 XJ6 Sport 3.2
'04 Rover 75 CDTi