Bizarrely though, when British Leyland/Leyland Cars/Austin Rover (or whatever name the struggling vehicle maker was known as that week!) facelifted the Marina for the fourth and last time in 1980 to create the renamed Ital – its final Morris passenger car model (once the UK’s best-selling marque) – one of the odd and unnecessary changes made to the model was replacing the Marina’s distinctive rectangular door handles with some new and anonymous items (also later used on the Huandu 9105, a Chinese remake of the Morris Ital estate and van). Strange, as this remarkable small piece of British engineering quickly became the OEM parts bit darling of the UK’s celebrated specialist sportcar industry and kit car companies, being fitted to numerous sporting machines and robust off-roaders.
These included familiar and desirable British performance exotica, such as the Lotus Esprit, Elite II, Eclat and Excel, plus the revised second-generation Reliant Scimitar GTE and GTC (plus the subsequent revamped Middlebridge versions), the Ginetta G21 (and late G15s), the one-off TVR SM coupe and exciting UVA MD GTR V8-powered McLaren M6 replica.
Other niche British low-volume cars to incorporate the oblong Marina door handles will have you reaching for your computer to Google them (some are so obscure that you might struggle to find them) or dig out your dusty old car books, encyclopaedias or magazines. From my own research, the extensive list of other vehicles using these Morris components runs to more than 75 other cars, including a wealth of UK kit cars, plus plenty of unique prototypes and dead-end dream cars, surely making these Marina’s items the most prolific car door handles of all time. At the risk of boring you, the long list includes; the 1984 Africar prototypes (with three different body styles), the AD 400/Daytona Classics Magnum 400, Alto Duo and Coupe, Avante MK I,II, Badsey Bullet, Bohanna Stables Diablo (which became the AC 3000ME), Carbodies CR6 taxi prototype, Claydon Tara 2, Eagle Milan +2, Enfield Safari, GP Centron/MDB Sapphire, GKN Sankey/Elswick Envoy invalid car, Gilbern T11 prototype, Ginetta G23 and G24, Griffon GD-XM, GTM Coupe, Interstyl Hustler (various), Kingfisher Sprint, Kingfisher Kustoms Kango, Kudos coupe, the Kiwi Magnum Spectre and Mararn coupe, Magenta TXR, Mini Marcos (some, late), MCR GT40 replica, Mutant 4x4 Pick-Up, Mystique M1 coupe, NCF Diamond (some), Nimbus coupe, Reliant FW9 coupe prototype, RW Karma, the amphibious Sea Roader, Seraph Sports Racer, Shado Sorento, Shepard SUV, Stevens Cipher, Tornado M6 GT, post-1975 Trident coupes, Whitby Warrior, the list goes on and on…
Well, I did warn you that it’s obscure! Oh, and did I mention that the Morris Marina’s indicator stalk switchgear was also used on the Triumph Stag and eventually became part of the Lamborghini Diablo?