Meet the Owner – Alastair Fitton and his Rover 75, ‘Grace’

It’s fair to say that Alastair Fitton, founder of the Bus Stop Model Museum in Rochdale, Greater Manchester, was in the right place at the right time when an early Rover 75 came his way.

As his model museum celebrates its first decade, another anniversary needs observing. Quite aside from the miniature 75 and ZTs in cabinets, his 1:1 scale, full-size 75 has been back on the road for the same amount of time.

Not that he was on the hunt for an example of Rover’s last great hope, you understand; he’d simply handed over £120 to stop the scrap man from carting it away.

Having a run a turbodiesel 75 in the early Noughties, he simply couldn’t stand and watch a car he’d long admired go over the weighbridge. Three years after MG Rover’s demise in 2005, many of its cars were heading that way, the trade keen to wash their hands of products from a newly defunct maker.

No 75 deserved such a fate – but the present day was catching up to Rover’s flagship, just as the boneyard had with its historic namesakes.

Mad as it seems, nearly a quarter of a century has gone by since Rover Group revealed its last luxury car, one that the fate of the company depended, a story which we all now know the ending to.

‘[The realisation of what I had] kicked in when I saw it was a 2.5 V6 and not a 1.8. I assumed it was a lowly model because if they’d sold it to me for £120,’ Alastair said. ‘It had to be a basic one, [I didn’t even know if it had leather.’

What Alastair had saved was in fact a dealer launch car, replete in Wedgwood Blue, with all the trimmings. ‘It had everything known to man’, Alastair confirmed.

Connoisseur SE trim meant a host of sought-after equipment in 75 circles, including an electric rear sun blind, embossed head rests and silver chromed dishes in the troughs behind the door handles, as well as Neptune Blue leather seats and the now-infamous ‘Highline’ stereo used in contemporary BMWs.

Alastair said: ‘I sat in the car with the paperwork and went through it and it was then that I picked up on the chassis number in the warranty book; [another] date that stood out was the date of registration, which was 23 June 1999, and I knew that to be launch week when 75s were first out on the roads.’

Further examination of the paperwork revealed that it was the 154^th production 75 built: VIN logs by Alastair’s count began at ‘1000’, and since doing its tour of the dealers, it had passed through several owners, its significance unimportant, before appearing in the local area.

75 production switched from Cowley, Oxfordshire, to Longbridge in the West Midlands, by the middle of 2000, making first-year 75s like Alastair’s, identifiable at a glance by their black outer sills, few and far between. Wedgwood Blue was a launch colour, and while it was adopted in the later Longbridge cars, MG-Rover.org notes that it became a slightly different shade.

Alastair had owned a 75 once before, but it was a turbodiesel shared with his father. They’d part-exchanged a late model, ‘soft dash’ Range Rover Classic for it in 2001, and while Alastair enjoyed the car, he felt the BMW turbo diesel let the package down. ‘Throughout [ownership], we’d wished we’d bought a petrol’, he said.

That 75 was in lofty company, as he’d persuaded his dad out of buying an ex Japanese Domestic Market parallel import Bentley Mulsanne before signing on the dotted line for that first 75.

His dad was rather taken with Crewe’s finest – but Alastair, as part owner, wasn’t. ‘“It’s not you dad, I said, and it’s certainly not me,” Alastair said. They’re a barge and I regaled him with cost of spares.

Fittingly, local Rover dealer, Richard Cort of Radcliffe, (which sadly went out of business not long after MG Rover was shuttered) was less than 200 yards down the road from where the Bentley was on offer. His dad didn’t need much persuading.

Before that, a neighbour’s two-week extended test drive of a 75 2.5 V6 had cemented the Rover as a car Alastair wanted. It was a Primrose Yellow car with contrasting black leather, and the man across the road, a company owner who normally ran Mercedes S-Classes, rated the 75 above said Benzes.

‘He enjoyed it because he was very much into his British cars, he had a TR6 and adored the 75,’ said Alastair.

‘My jaw hit the floor when I saw that car’, Alastair recalled. ‘My neighbour had wangled an extended test drive of that 75, and had followed it up to its launch.’ Sadly, the car went back to Lookers of Rochdale, having failed to impress the lady of the house.

That was then; this is how another 75 came into Alastair’s life. He noticed the 75, which he later named Grace, in the hands of a couple near his parents’ house. With Alastair’s turbodiesel 75 long sold and Grace’s dealer duties long over, it had passed through several owners without anyone realising its significance.

Alastair said: ‘I didn’t know what [specification] it was, it just looked mint. It was a beautiful looking car, every time I talked to them they told me how expensive it was to run but they were going to persevere, as they liked the finer things in life.’

Eventually, the 75 lost the private plate it had once worn, and had reverted to its ‘OA’ Birmingham area registration mark. ‘Midsomer Murders was prevalent on the TV [at the time], and the cars on screen had the same “OA” plates,’ Alastair said.

Time dragged on, and the couple were at a loss with what to do with the 75; it was developing problems and it was merely an old car with issues. It went up for sale with no takers, and soon, the couple approached Alastair for help.

He had a storage area for caravans nearby and it bought the couple time to think about what to do with the Rover, as its tax was soon to run out.

‘They came to me and said, “Alastair, we have this Rover 75 and its road tax is about to run out and can we take it off the road and put it in your field, we’ve got someone coming to look at it.”

At the time I wasn’t that interested, I mean, I liked it, but I’d just bought myself a Renault Mégane which I was happy with, but [the Rover] was getting old, as mad as that sounds at the time.

A month turned to six months and six months changed to a year, so I collared one of them and said, “What’s going on with the Rover?”. He said: “We don’t know what to do with it, we think we might scrap it.”

I said, “Whoa, steady on, how have we gone from trying to sell it [for a four-figure sum] not so many months ago to scrapping it?”

They’d had a guy come and look at it and said it wasn’t worth the asking price, and at that point it had begun to break springs [a very common 75 fault].

They were then working then on the basis that it was only worth scrap, and they certainly wouldn’t have spent money on a [by then] old car, that wasn’t in their mindset.

“Oh well,” he said, it needs this and that doing, it’s a very expensive car to run”, and by that point, Rover had gone out of business.

“How much has the scrap man said he’s prepared to give you for this thing?” [Alastair asked]. Put it this way, it was £120. I said: “I will give you £120 as I’m stood here now […] shove the keys and paperwork through my letter box and leave it my field.”’

Right place, right time. The 75 had survived a near-death experience – but it would be another 18 months, owing to work commitments, before Alastair would begin to revive it.

Sadly, mildew had got in during the 75’s stay among the caravans.
‘I did go and clean it,’ Alastair said. ‘It was four doors open, boot open, bonnet open as the mice had made nests from the insulation.

But it still fired up and I was able to move it around the field, even with the broken springs, I managed to get it into a garage belonging to a neighbour of my parents, and between the two of us, we changed the broken springs and got it mobile again.’

Slowly but surely, Grace was heading back to the highway. A local garage replaced a missing wheel arch liner, and got it up to MoT standard. A new viscous cooling fan was sourced, alongside another drivers’ window as it had become scuffed by debris trapped in the door aperture.

By 2012, the 75 was running again, but the bills hadn’t stopped; replacing the corroded rear brake lines (no doubt owing to its outside stay) rang the till further.

Alastair described the journey as a ‘long process between me paying my £120 and then actually driving: ‘I got rid of the [daily] Mégane and the Rover became my every day car. The first bill came to £800, then I had all the belts done.’

That was with 73,000 miles on the clock, and bit by bit, ‘every sensor under the sun’ was replaced, including a rear ABS wheel sensor that involved taking the seats outs. Later, a full stainless exhaust went on, allowing Alastair to full enjoy the snarl of the KV6 at full chat.

75 aficionados will be stunned (or deeply envious) to hear that the oft-troublesome VIS sensors, which allow the engine to breathe better as the revs pile on, have never given Alastair any trouble. We think that, after the misery of the ABS sensor replacement, Grace owed him that one.

Maintenance aside, Alastair has clocked more than 20,000 miles behind the wheel of his 75, leaving him stranded only once – last year, it boiled dry in the summer heat, a thermostat housing having cracked.

We’ll ignore the Highline stereo which eventually died – a pity, as it incorporated a sat-nav and a TV – it was soon replaced with a Pioneer head unit that had to be hardwired in, owing to the proprietary connectors used in the Highline’s operation.

The boil-over was put down to what Alastair calls ‘the curse of the modern motor car’.
‘It may not look it necessarily, but the 75 is a modern car in that it uses a plastic thermostat housing,’ he said. ‘Were it an SD1, that housing would have been made of metal.’

Grace is not a car that Alastair has any plans to sell. Used only in the good weather (he has a Toyota Aygo for the daily grind), he’s taken the 75 on runs to Buxton with the Rochdale Classic and Collectors’ Car Club, of which he is a member, and in convoy during Drive It Day to Barton Grange in Lancashire.

His regard for the model is total – and that’s high praise for someone who ran a string of XJ12s (carburetted and fuel-injected Series 2s and 3s) back in the day, and turned down a part share in a Bentley Mulsanne.

Those Jags were frequently enjoyed across some of Lancashire’s best driving roads – the same ones used to benchmark TVRs back in the Peter Wheeler era; Grace has since tackled those same routes, and, if anything, was faster and as comfortable.

‘I would go so far to say with my car history and my dad’s car history, you can’t really see the join, we’ve had XJ12s…personally, by the time I was on my last XJ12 on a D plate, I can’t distinguish the drive in my Rover, to that of the Jag,’ Alastair said.

‘I don’t feel anything lacking in the response of the Rover, as the Jaguars were so constrained they were a shadow of what the earlier cars had been. It wafts in the same way as a [Jaguar] Series 3, that would be my impression of a drive out in a 75.

I ran a limousine business on the side and one of my jobs was taking an elderly customer to Morecambe; she enjoyed the ride there [in the Jaguars] but it was just me on the way back; I used to enjoy going on the runs back home through Dunsop Bridge and the Trough of Bowland.

The 75 is so good, it’s the equal of a Series 3, and I’m sticking my neck out.’

Well-represented in Alastair’s model museum, Grace is one example of a full-size 75 that isn’t going anywhere. Some people have all the luck…