I mean, look at this picture; the car is squarely in the way of all those sheep, in the middle of some field, no actual road in easy sight. The sheepboy is turning to his friend, and you can almost imagine him calling out “Who the hell’s car is this? What this thing doing here? Crikey, Yahoo Serious, shrimp on barbie” or whatever the hell Aussies say when inconvenienced by a big-ass car. I’ll have to ask David’s friend Lawrence. Despite being parked in ways that inconvenience scores of sheep and their handlers, I actually quite like these massive P76s. The styling somehow feels like a cartoon car, like Homer Simpson’s car, a crude rendering of the concept of a car more than of a specific car itself:
Plus, the P76 was known for being able to swallow a 44 gallon drum in its cavernous trunk.
Was this something 1970s Australians were demanding? Is this the only form that, say, dogfood was sold in 1977 Sydney or something? This sure makes the usual American golf bag standard of trunk sizing seem pretty candy-assed, right? Originally they were teenagers in the ’70s, now they’re shown as having been teenagers in the ’90s. The worst part is we now lose all of Abe Simpson’s bizarre WWII experience and his ’50s jobs. On the other hand * Wheels magazine made it their car of the year in 1973. * A P76 won the Targa Florio secion of 74 HTH Or maybe its just the 70s My P76 story comes from a schoolmate of Croatian background back in the late 80s. Fancied himself as cool, suave and in control and then bought a big, blue V8 P76. Naturally, anything out in the wild in Australia that long and still running had be fiddled with. So it turned out this thing had a turn of speed its dynamics couldn’t support. As a result of some foolish schoolboy goading and some equally foolish schoolboy heroics…a certain P76 full of idiots managed to pin a landing in the middle of a set of traffic lights (#green) after a rather unexpected 20 foot flight off a suburban Sydney railway bridge one quiet Saturday morning in 1986… This was also a party trick of all but early-model Volvo 240s. Next time you see one, check out the ‘buttcheeks’, a bit more than a tire wide, one behind (and parallel to) each rear wheel. There’s many reasons for the failure of BL in Australia, not all of them are on the P76 and a good portion of blame is directly on UK management. My dad actually worked at the Zetland plant in Sydney from the late 60s until the close of BL. He passed away when I was 8 so we never got to discuss those times. Maybe someday I’ll get a chance to talk with some people involved and clear up some things around this car and BL Australia. What do you think is in that barrel anyway? It has to be one of the top-10 worst engineered/built cars ever. https://www.whichcar.com.au/features/leyland-p76-history Also, I find it odd that they didn’t go full 55 gallon drum in the trunk. The cylinder is only 5 3/4 inches taller than a 44 gallon, and it looks like they have enough space for it. Maybe it’s this kind of half-assery that prevented them from selling enough to stay in business. Sorry.
