Austin Apache

"Laurence" (mrlaurence) 11/27/2016 at 07:35 • Filed to: Austin apache, ADO16, Weird British cars

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I’d never heard of this until now - they’re a restyled 4 Door version of the ADO16 platform built for the South African market - pretty odd, but also quite nice looking imho, sort of like a baby triumph 2000

(As a sidenote, the number of variations of the ADO16 platform is crazy - this chart doesn’t even show all the different bodystyles)

pip bip - choose Corrour > Laurence 11/27/2016 at 07:54

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what’s really odd about that pic is the car is left hand drive, so that rules out South Africa. maybe somewhere else in Africa?

AuthiCooper1300 > Laurence 11/27/2016 at 08:01

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Well, actually that one in the picture is not an Apache, but an Austin Victoria – itself a variant of the Apache – built in Spain in the mid 70s. The main difference is in the front. Even the less expensive version of the Victoria grille area (with two headlamps instead of four) looked slightly different from the Apache, by the way.

The fact that it looks a bit like a Triumph is due to the person in charge of the aggiornamento of the ADO16 body – a certain Giovanni Michelotti.

There aren’t many Victorias left. Most of those have been cannibalised to fit the engine/gearbox unit to small-engined Minis. The DeLuxe version in particular had exactly the same engine spec as the Spanish Mini Cooper 1300, with twin 1.25 SUs and, wonder of wonders, an alternator.

Unfortunately CR was just 8.8:1 on account of the bad quality of Spanish petrol so they did not perform as well as most of the 1275 engines available at the time in the UK.

Laurence > AuthiCooper1300 11/27/2016 at 08:06

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This even more complicated than I could ever have imagined - odd that they kept the Austin name though, rather than an Authi (like Spanish built minis of the era)

AuthiCooper1300 > Laurence 11/27/2016 at 08:18

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Automóviles Hispano Ingleses (AUTHI; “Spanish-English Automobiles”) was the name of the parent company.

There were Austin cars and Morris cars and even MGs (only with the ADO16 body); Minis started off being “Morris”, in line with BMC/BLMC policy of mostly using the Morris brand for the export market. Later, again in line with BLMC/BL policy, they became just “Minis” (although in the official car papers they were still called as “Morris”).

The first Minis built in Spain were of the Authi-Morris 1275 C model, in late 1968. It was a sort of detuned Mk2 Cooper S with a single HS4 1.5-inch carburettor and low compression engine. But it was very nicely appointed: disc brakes with servo, leather seats (the passenger one had a tilting backrest to ease entry for the rear passengers), wood-rimmed steering wheel, rev counter, fog lights etc. Rumour has it that Seat –state-owned through the INI holding (similar to the Italian IRI)– put pressure on Authi to build “luxury” versions only of the Mini so as not to threaten their ubiquitous Seat (Fiat) 600.

In Spain Minis were always seen as a sort of upmarket product, or, at least, the kind of car just bright young attractive people of means would buy. Build quality was not excellent. The steel used in the bodyshell, however, was much better quality than anything built in Spain at the time, courtesy of AUTHI’s origins as an ofshoot of a steel-mill company, Nueva Montaña Quijano (NMQ for short, as can still be seen in their licence-built SU carbs).

Authi’s old factory in Landabén, Navarre, is part now of the VW Group. The same plant built for Seat another Spanish “anomaly” – Lancia Beta Coupés and HPEs in the 80s.