Rallying
In 1970, Donald Stokes ordered the BMC Competitions Department closed and disbanded. By the time the Marina appeared, it was becoming obvious that Stage Rallying was gaining popularity and in early 1971 it was decided to use the new model in the 1971 RAC rally, the following November. Luckily for BL, Special Tuning had a rally driver on its books by the name of Brian Culcheth and so with no team, no mechanics, no funding and initially no sponsorship a team of talented engineers developed a 1.3 Coupe into a rally car, funded purely by sales of performance parts from Special Tuning.
Knowing that the 1.8 engine was too heavy for decent handling, they concentrated on the 1.3 engine and using Mini components got good horsepower figures from it; then they played a flanker to pen the field in the 1.3 classes. All rally teams used one particular course to test, so the car was fitted with a full-race 1.8 and blasted around the track in front of the Ford rally team — consequently they withdrew from the 1.3 class allowing the car to claim 1st in Class for the 1971 Rally.
Subsequently, the car was entered in seventeen more national and international rallies until 1975, either being placed or winning class honours in twelve of them, the others being crashes/failures.
For 1976, BL management decided to move to the Triumph Dolomite Sprint for its main rallying weapon.
In 1974 Foden commissioned a Rover V8-engined Marina to compete in the London-Sahara-Munich rally. This stormed through several stages before suffering rear-axle failure in the desert. The rear axle had been the only part sourced from outside the BL parts bin.
Read more about this topic: Morris Marina