Thirty-one years after its launch the Austin Allegro has become the ultimate ironic classic car. It was Britain's equivalent to Ford's 1950s marketing disaster the Edsel, and became the symbol of everything that was wrong with British Leyland in the '70s. Billed as the volume-selling saviour of what was then still the world's fourth largest car manufacturer, this dumpy family saloon seemed to get off to a bad start from which it never really recovered. It leaked, its rear screen popped out if you jacked it up in the wrong place and, for some reason, it had a square steering wheel. What's more, if you believed everything you read in the Daily Mail, it was thrown together by Communists who, if they weren't on strike, were kipping on the nightshift. It seems eternally wrapped up in that grim '70s world of the three-day week and power cuts...
... "If the Quartic steering wheel had been on a Citroen, everybody would have said 'what a fantastic example of French eccentricity'. The idea was that you could see the instruments better, it was easier to get your legs under it when you got in, and it was like variable-rate power steering because you get more leverage at the corners when you are parking - and that actually works." All true in theory but critics - and buyers - hated it, including the police who converted all their Allegro panda cars to conventional wheels.
