Quote:
Originally Posted by Reebs
Thanks Cliff, good link
We were able to interview him some years ago for the club website,
you can read that here Richard Woolley Answers A Few Questions
and I was lucky enough to have a chat with him at the show too, I asked him if he had many constraints placed upon him by BMW in terms of costs, or the type of platform or materials that should be used, he said no, they gave me a brief to design a quintessentially British car and left me alone to come up with whatever designs I wanted. To this day he is still immensely proud of what he achieved and is gratified that his design still gives enormous pleasure to us owners. He owned a 75 back in the day and was sorry to part with it, in fact now he is actively looking for a low mileage, cared for 2.5 litre V6 Cowley example.
This was his original concept design, and the only thing he wasn't so happy about once it went into production was that the rear 'sat up' a little too highly for his taste, he would have preferred the car to have a lower ride height as seen in his drawings, but the decision to raise it was made to increase ride comfort.
You can see him being interviewed by Top Gear at the car's launch in this YouTube clip (he's 3.13 in)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JYKBcoRAWk
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From those sketches it looks like the car was designed to be a rear wheel drive (the proportions of the wing in front and behind the front wheel). I wonder was it expected to have bmw drive trains ?
Going by the wheelbase too, and position of rear wheels it would have had great comfort. Although being low down as that, I would reckon the expected customer base would have had issues getting in and out of the car.
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