While I was in Brighton recently I took the time to visit the Sussex Toy Museum, a must-visit if, like me, every day you fight your inner child to avoid filling your beautifully decorated and partner-friendly living room with bits of LEGO and old Hot-Wheels. Seeking a souvenir, I was pleased to notice a glass-fronted cabinet in which some of the displayed articles bore price tags. On the bottom row, on the left was something that caught my eye. I bought it for £3.95 and put it in my pocket, where I couldn’t resist jiggling it between my fingers in that tactile way that you might a pocket knife or set of keys. Finding it was a double-win. Not only is it a lovely little model, but it also represents one of the most fascinating footnotes of motoring history. It gives me an excuse to write about the Pininfarina 1800, Leyland’s would-be worldbeater. It’s a much overlooked fact that Farina has been linked with the British motor industry for decades. Indeed, for a while almost the entire BMC range had been shaped by Italian penwork, from the little Austin A40 through the A55 Cambridge to the big A110 Westminster, and badge-engineered versions thereof. And one Battista Farina was the man we have to thank. Of course, those machines eventually became rather dated. With their origins being in the late 50’s, at a time when even the Italians were fascinated by fins and things, by the mid-60’s the world was rather leaving the cars of the British Motor Corporation behind. Nevertheless, the engineering was still pretty sound. You may laugh, in fact I’m finding it hard to type this with a straight face, but there was some clever thinking going on with the oily bits under many BMC cars of the ’60s. Notable was the ADO16 or Austin 1100, which first used the Hydrolastic suspension system dreamt up by Alex Moulton, who worked with Alec Issigonis. It enabled bulky springs and dampers to be replaced by compact rubber ‘n fluid “displacer units” which were interconnected from the front to the rear of the car. It meant that, aside from rather exaggerated acceleration squat and brake dive, the new small Austins rode and handled very well indeed. And the same thinking would be applied to the bigger machines in the range as well. The ADO17 series also used Hydrolastic suspension, to great effect with ride quality being widely praised. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said about the styling. The engineers in charge had ended up with a set of proportions which were unusually wide and with a peculiarly long wheelbase, giving the stylists a heck of a challenge to come up with an elegant suit of clothes. Farina were involved once more, but pretty soon their holistic approach was kicked off the table; their original proposals being too close to the 1100, which they had also lent a hand with. The final result ended up earning the nickname “landcrab”, for reasons which are apparent when you take in its odd overall form. The Italians ended up dealing with just the grille and headlamp areas and the rear end styling, which would incidentally reappear modified on the Peugeot 504. The rest was all BMC’s own work. It wasn’t especially elegant and I do hope none of the design team went on to become cosmetic surgeons or tattooists. It all came to a head when the Austin 3-Litre was in the throes of being created, or even mutated. The design challenge issued to Pininfarina had been to create a new car using the windscreen, cabin section and doors of the 1800. Disgusted by having to work against such inflexible constraints, and envisaging that any likely result would be truly hideous, Pininfarina bid Ciao to BMC. In the process, though, they had acquired an 1800 floorplan and running gear. Just for fun, a team headed by Leonard Fioravanti set upon to create the Austin 1800 that would have have resulted if Pininfarina had had overall control from the beginning. Their striking creation was named Berlina Aerodynamica, and it was almost insultingly different to the ADO17. From the British sow’s ear, the Italians had created a silk purse. It drew from the considerable interest in aerodynamic theory which had been coursing through veins of the Italian car-design school at around that time, with Giugiaro also flirting with teardrop shapes elsewhere. And aerodynamic it was. 0.35 was the CD, ten points better than the already surprisingly good 0.45 of the British original. That extra slipperiness would go some way to offsetting the massive weight that the overengineered hull of the ADO17 was cursed by. Ironically the hand-built Berlina ended up even heavier, but much of this excess flab could be trimmed during prep for mass production, the Italians claimed. And even when tested as a fatty, the aerodynamic Berlina managed around 10mph more than the identically engineered 1800. As if to rub British noses in it, the prototype that was wheeled around motorshows all over Europe had prominent BMC badging on that sleek, grille-less bow (made possible by engine air being drawn in from louvres below the bumper). You know the rest, or can guess, anyway. Of couse, the starchy reaction from The Management of BMC was something amounting to “Thanks, but no thanks”. Whether it was pride, cost or just reasons of sheer bloody-mindedness, the British had absolutely no interest in anything other than a tacit acknowledgement of Pininfarina’s good work, either on what they had achieved with the 1800 or their follow-up on the 1100 chassis, which was basically a smaller version of the same. They just weren’t interested, and as choices go, I’d rank that one on a par with that of stopping a disc-grinder by burying it in your groin. For Frito-Lay to release “Sewage ‘n Cyanide” potato chips would be a better business decision, but that was the peculiar way that it all went down. But that wonderful shape endured. Its influence went on to be seen on myriad ultra-successful cars of the ’70s and ’80s, and it’s fair to say that cars would probably all look very different today had this stylistic quantum-leap not occurred in 1967. The Citroen GS of 1970 looked remarkably similar to the 1100 and the classic Citroen CX, for example, came out a full seven years later and has very clear parallels with the Berlina Aerodynamica. Indeed, there was no evidence that BMC had taken a blind bit of notice until well after the infamous merger with Leyland; the adoption of a streamlined hatchback shape for the Rover SD1 surely wasn’t just a whim. Tragic, really because it would have been a chance for the British motor industry to really steal a march on the rest of the world. Anyway, it didn’t happen and it all ended up as just a note in the margin of the history books, which makes my finding this 1969 Matchbox toy all the more worthy of celebration. It’s in remarkably good condition for its forty-five years and the actual casting is easily the equal of todays Hot-Wheels or Matchbox models. It even has opening front doors and some attempt at modelling the interior. Best of all it rides on Lesney Products’ patent “superfast” wheels and bearings, meaning I can whiz it across my dining table with great enthusiasm, imagining the life-size version doing the same on the open road. And when it careers off the table and lands on the carpet with it’s wheels in the air, I can read on its belly that evocative phrase most frequently found in the past: “Made in England”. (Model car images Hooniverse/Chris Haining 2014, Berlina Aerodynamica and ADO16/17 images borrowed from the excellent  http://www.aronline.co.uk)