Sydney upholsterer.

[Curly3]

Commonly known as the P38, half the car they thought they'd be.
I had a mate who had one of the V8's and it went all right, did you ever put a 44 in the boot Foss?

[JAP 454]

Yeah, Steve but the P38 Lightning was one of the faster WW 2 piston engine warbirds Ehh !! but I prefer to call them the P152, twice the car everyone reckoned they were !!
They did share a lot of components with the common Ford Valiant and Holden cars, gearboxes , diffs brakes etc etc AND the motor was originally a GM or some other Yanke mob's design.
Nuff said

Didn't put a 44 in the boot, but put a heap of BMX bikes in there plus a heap of Taralga kids on the back seat when I took them to the races in Goulburn, Steve Bennet, who rode the Gally at the '10 CDT Nats at Griffith used to race BMX with my mob when he was a kid
Foss

[firko]

When I lived at Maroubra Beach in the late 80's the University of NSW Arts professor who lived across the street had a genuine Leyland P76 Force 7 coupe (and a Porsche 911 wide body). The old bloke was in his late seventies then so I'd presume he'd be long dead so I wonder what happened to the car? I'd imagine it would be worth a fortune, despite being as ugly as a boil on your forehead. Very few hit the showroom before the whole P76 project was dropped altogether. Back in the early 80's I worked with a couple of travelling Pommy boilermakers who'd bought a 6 cylinder P76 to drive around during their stay. One of them got busted for drugs so they had to bolt back to the UK pretty quickly so they just left the Leyland in the work carpark with the keys in the ignition. We all used the car for months until the rego ran out and we then dumped it. The 6 cylinder motor was a wheezy piece of crap that had no hope of competing with the Holden 202 or Falcon 250 sixes on an even footing but the car was roomy and handled really well. Naturally one of the first things we tried was whether a 44 gallon drum would actually fit in the boot and yup.....it most certainly did!
                                                            

[firko]

the motor was originally a GM or some other Yanke mob's design

The motor was based on the Buick/Olds/Pontiac alloy V8 that was used by GM in the sixties. The P76 version was a bored and stroked 4.5l copy of the 3.5l Oldsmobile version while the Range Rover used a straight copy of the Buick version, the main difference being the heads and metric threads and dimensions. The famous Repco V8 formula 1 engine was also based on the same block. The BOP engine was one of the most advanced and versatile designs to come out of Detroit but being only 3.5 litres was a decade ahead of its time in the big block muscle car mad USA of the 60's/70's.

For years I had a pair of P76 alloy wheels on my bike trailer until one morning I arose to find the trailer sitting on the ground with both wheels gone. I'd like to think that they ended up on some punters P76 resto.