When the Rover SD1 line first appeared in the mid-1970s, the goal was to simplify the large British Leyland car line and to bring about an air of sportiness to the lineup…the Ferrari Daytona-looking nose cone on these cars isn’t incidental. And on the surface, you’d think they had hit a home run: available with the Rover V8, looking surprisingly good, the promise was on the surface kept. But this is British Leyland in the mid-1970s, which makes any vehicle issues in the United States look relatively tame by comparison. Strikes, quality control issues, crap paint on early models, and so on dinged the enthusiasm for the Rover. Amazingly the model, even with all of these problems, managed to last ten years on the market under a variety of model names, including Turbo, Vanden Plas, V8-S, and Vitesse. But it was all the same…Special Development 1.

This example you see here is NOT all the same Rover. For starters, it appears that the only thing left of the SD1 is the outward appearance, which is in remarkably good shape. It’s obviously a race car, thanks to the gutted interior and network of piping inside. Underneath the hood, however, and this Brit starts to resemble an American. That’s a Dodge R5P7 NASCAR block sitting in the Rover’s engine bay, which will give it the grunt to run as a historic racer and a sound that will entice even the most jaded European spectator. You can’t argue with a V8 that is content to spin at 9,000 RPM for hours on end!