<<A Landcrab is the 1800 series sedans made by BMC. Basically it was BMC's
largest front-wheel drive car to that day, and supposively took all the
knowledge of Issnosigis and all the excellent traits of the 1100/1300 and the
Mini and made a bigger car. Stupidly though, it also used 1100/1300 doors and
came out rather repulsive! >>
Some more landcrab info - this was the car for which they developed the first
5 main bearing engine - it only made it into the MGB around a year later, with
various small changes for non-transverse installation. You can put most of the
tuning stuff on a landcrab, and I have seen HRG/Webered ones that performed
quite adequately.
They usee to test the torsional stiffness of various car chassis (I don'
recall who did the testing) by bolting them down, bolting a bar to one end,
hanging weights on the bar, and measuring how much the chassis twisted. The
landcrab was either the best or maybe second best, I don't recall, that they
had ever seen up to that point, which explains why they made pretty good
ralley cars. If you are going to have good handling, you need a solid frame
that doesn't move around to hang the suspension from, and the 1800 was
excellent from this point of view, if not from the esthetic one.
One final note - you could also get a six cylinder version of the car, with a
detuned MGC engine in it, the only other car to ever use that engine, in the
Austin 3 litre. They did have to strech it a bit, and I have no idea what that
did to the stiffness, and it wasn't a transverse engine, but it still had it's
full share of ugly!
Bill S.
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