Smooth Movers

It’s hard to believe today but the Audi 100 was rated as the overpriced underdog when the Rover SD1 was in its prime.

- Iain Wakefield

It’s amazing how time and tastes change when it comes to buying cars, as flicking through a pile of well thumbed Autocar magazines from the early 1980s revealed a headline declaring how the latest Audi saloon was set to give Rover a serious run for its money. Move on just over 30 years and Rover-badged cars have been resigned to the history books, leaving Audi as one of the main players to fill the vacuum left by the once highly respected Viking longboat-badged marque.

It wasn’t always like this, as the majority of UK motorists back in the late 1970s and early 1980s were still quite patriotic when it came to the cars they chose. The 1976-launched Rover SD1 3500 V8 was initially received well by the press and the introduction of the six-cylinder powered 2300 and 2600 a year later proved a hit with middle management and the all important fleet buyers.

Meanwhile, a resurgent Audi was prospering under the wing of the Volkswagen Group and the same year the covers came off the SD1, Ingolstadt-based Audi launched the restyled C2 series 100 saloon. Power for the refreshed 100 came from a fuel-injected 136bhp inline-five cylinder engine; a unit Audi claimed was ‘as smooth as a four but with the power of a six’.

In 1982 Audi launched the heavily revamped 100 C3 series, one of the first production cars to be marketed for its CD aerodynamic capabilities. That was the same year Rover introduced the inline-four O-Series powered version of the SD1 along with an oil burner, while a facelift across the whole range and a steady increase in quality control kept the five-door Rover in the showroom for another four years.

ROVER 2600 SD1