Reg and the Renaissance
Meet Reg Jones, a proud Queenslander whose passion has never strayed from what Leyland built in Zetland.
Reg celebrating after competing in a sprint event
Now residing on a roomy property 10 minutes from the centre of Caboolture, Queensland, Reg has made the best of being pushed out of Buderim by property developers and now has two sheds worth of Australian metal that is anything but average.
We dialled Reg late on a Friday evening after a long week of earthmoving, a profession pursued since he was a teenager. With a fleet of no less than 10 Leyland P76 sedans, we wanted to know why Reg cares so much for one of Australia’s most contentious motor vehicles.
An Australian Upbringing
Reg’s life started on a farm in country Western Australia where he was surrounded by local machinery from the get-go.
“From memory, our family always had Valiants,” he recalled. “We had all the AP5 Valiant utes and very early on, my brother owned a Valiant Pacer with a 265 cubic-inch Hemi-6 motor.”
Work began in his early teenage years with a couple of bobcats and a plan. As a partner in business with his older brother, Reg chased building projects all over Perth.
A Choice of Four
With money flowing in from earthmoving, a personal milestone on the horizon and a firm precedent set by his older brother, Reg was ready to purchase his first car.
By 1973, he had saved enough for a brand-new one.
At the time, the market for new cars was dominated by the big three Australian manufacturers; Holden, Ford and Chrysler. However, a fourth player, Leyland Australia, was emerging with a product aimed squarely at snaring a sizable share of the passenger car pie.
The local arm of the British parent had developed a brand-new car coined as the P76. It looked distinctive, it gripped the road differently and it offered features the big three wouldn’t match in their volume-selling Kingswood, Falcon and Valiant products. When the P76 won Wheels Magazine’s Car of the Year and examples began flooding from the Zetland factory in Sydney’s inner-east, it was more than enough to scare the horses.
“My brother had a HR Holden. From memory, he then bought a Holden Torana GTR. It was very clear where his allegiances lay.”
“Coming up to my 17th birthday, I drove the Holden, Ford and Chrysler products and then the Leyland P76.
“When I drove the P76, I fell in love with it. It was a beautiful car to drive and it was a fully Australian-designed vehicle from the ground up.
The first of his many Leyland P76s
“I immediately noticed that when you sat in the car, whether you were short or tall, the steering wheel was always in the right place. It didn’t matter where you moved the seat. The gear lever was in the right place, too.
“When I test drove it, I can remember the salesman sitting in the passenger’s seat when we were going down the freeway in Perth saying, ‘Look, just relax in the car. It’s not like the other cars where you have to fight with the steering wheel. You can take your hands off the wheel and the car will go dead straight.’
“I said ‘No, you can’t take your hands off the steering wheel!’ He told me to calmly loosen my grip of the wheel and feel how well the car drove by itself, and that’s how it was.
“The suspension and the brakes made the car handle far superior to all the others and to top it off, it was quieter and used less fuel.”
After its release, Australia was still figuring out how it felt about the Leyland P76. Many owners adored the car for how it differed from the others, but for the majority of the car-buying public, its notoriety was for all the wrong reasons.
The mammoth boot, capable of carrying a 44-gallon drum, made the proportions very different to what the public was used to. Once production got going, build quality issues began to emerge as Leyland pushed for brisk pace of assembly. To top it off, the world was worried about the availability of oil, something the big V8 motor cars guzzled in excess.
All this meant that any momentum the P76 had was quickly nullified by a sinking reputation worsened by the parent company’s struggles to conceal its haemorrhaging bank balance.
“I was supposed to be buying a HQ Holden, so you can imagine what my brother was expecting me to come home with. However, I came back and told him I had bought a Leyland P76.
“He wouldn’t get in it and he wouldn’t even think about driving it.”
No Other Option
A fateful mechanical failure finally put the protest on hold.
“The first time my brother drove the car was about six months after I bought it. We broke a differential in the work truck and he needed to travel from Perth to Bunbury, which was a trip of about 90 miles.
“As it happened, the diff wouldn’t fit in my brother’s Torana. He was stuck, so I said to him, ‘take the P76 down.’ Very reluctantly, he took it. He was down to Bunbury in about an hour and back in about two hours.
“Within four weeks, he had bought one. True story!”
Across the Ditch
The subsequent decade brought great hardship to Reg’s life.
“My brother was tragically killed in a truck accident and everything fell over in the building industry during the early ‘80s. A lot of people from Perth went over to New Zealand around that time and we ended up moving across the ditch in about ’83.”
By then, Leyland Australia left the land down under too. However, Reg wasn’t about to shift his piece of short-lived Australian motoring history.
“I still had the P76 which I had bought brand new in ’73. That was sent to New Zealand on a British Airways flight from Perth to Auckland and we ended up driving that car all around New Zealand. I clocked 978,000 miles in that car. Not bad for a first car!
Reg’s first P76 in New Zealand
“The only problem was, it started to get very rusty. That’s because we lived near the ocean in Tauranga on the North Island.”
Braving the Banter
Reg ended up returning to Australia and settled in Queensland. So did his faithful P76.
“Around that time, I also owned a naturally-aspirated Nissan Silvia which was good fun. I took it down to Willowbank a fair bit, but I decided I was going to sell it.”
A friend of Reg then posed a question that has put smiles on faces at sprint and time attack events around south-east Queensland ever since.
“He asked me, ‘why don’t you just take the P76 down?’
“And what, everybody laugh at it?”
Reg’s doubt was quickly shelved.
“I ended up going down there with my P76 and gave it a run. Even though it was much slower than my Nissan Silvia, everybody loved it.
“I did that for a while, but the rust was starting to become a big problem. They weren’t worth much then, so we parted it out. However, I am very happy to say that the 4.4-litre V8 motor survives to this day.”
Expanding the Fleet
Even after the painful process of dismantling his first motor car, Reg remained infatuated with the big sedans built in Sydney’s inner-east.
“I kept on buying P76s when they were really cheap.”
“When I purchased my brown car, nobody even wanted to look at it. They laughed at me for buying these cars that were only four or five hundred dollars. They said they were never going to be worth any money, but I had the passion for them. It didn’t bother me enough to think twice.
“I bought my orange P76 for $750 dollars in 1999. That was originally driven by a guy who owned EMI Records in Brisbane. He eventually passed it on to his daughter, but she didn’t want it. It was pretty much rust-free and to this day, everything underneath is as good as you see on the outside.
Reg’s orange P76 on the hoist
“It’s only done 98,000 kilometres. It took me about four years to bring it all back to original spec. The paintwork is all original, the interior is all original, it’s all original right down to the hubcaps.
“I also have three Targa Florio editions, one in Aspen Green and two in Omega Navy. These are special edition cars and the name came from a Targa Tasmania-style event that took place in Sicily which was part of the World Cup Rally. I think Leyland built five or six hundred of them and made them a special car with a few other bits and pieces.
“The other ones I own need to be rebuilt. One day I’ll get around to it with all the parts I have. For now, I’ll keep slowly doing them up. They’re great cars to work on.”
The engine bay of Reg’s orange P76
The Resurgence
Having heard the same taunts for decades, Reg knows the darkest days for the P76 are behind it. Now, he’s enjoying the uptick in interest.
“They laughed at me 20 years ago, but now, plenty of people are starting to chase them. It’s dragging the cars back on top where they should have been from the start.
“On the road, you get a lot of people taking photos as they go past you on the Bruce Highway. It’s very common to get a thumbs up, so that makes me believe they are slowly coming back in the eyes of everyday motorists.
“At the track, people come up and tell me to keep bringing the car. The enthusiasts think it’s an awesome car to watch and a unique way to promote part of our motoring history.
Competing at a sprint event in his brown P76
“A lot of people don’t know too much about them, so that gives me some purpose. At the track, young guys come over and have a look underneath the front of it to see if it’s all-wheel drive! I have been asked me that many times, because it rarely ever loses traction.”
“The engineers got the design right. It’s as simple as that.”
A growing group of passionate owners and enthusiasts like Reg will keep celebrating a uniquely Australian product that dared to topple the big three. Thanks to them, the product that small group of Australians built in Zetland will never be forgotten.
Keen to see what the Leyland P76 can do in the flesh? You can reliably find Reg competing at sprint events in south-east Queensland. If that’s too far to travel, he’s become something of a social media star in this video from Wondai earlier in the year.
A big thanks to Reg for kicking off our ‘Owners’ series! If you know of an owner with an Australian car and a story to tell, please nominate them to feature.
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