Formed on 13 May 1968, British Leyland was, for a time, the second biggest car company outside the US (after VW).

It was created out of the merger between the Leyland Motor Corporation and British Motor Holdings, which were the two largest wholly British car manufacturing groups in the UK at the time. 

The resultant industrial sprawl saw Austin, Morris, MG, Triumph, Rover, Jaguar, Land Rover, Riley, Wolseley, Vanden Plas and Daimler thrown together, along with an extensive assortment of truck, bus and engineering businesses.

The indigestability of this merger, together with massive underfunding and nightmarish industrial unrest saw the business shrinking faster than a lake in an Australian drought.

But that didn’t stop some interesting machines from emerging, several of them legends, before the increasingly stained British Leyland (BL) name was eliminated, in 1986. Join us as we take a look at its best...