Wednesday 12th July 2023

Book Review  By Ken Davies

The Metro 6R4 Diaries

Author Wynne Mitchell is a seasoned automotive engineer with considerable competition experience, having started his career as a student apprentice with the Rootes Group before studying mechanical engineering at Birmingham University. Wynne joined Austin Rover Group (ARG) July 1984 to work on the company’s sensational offering for the Group B era - the MG Metro 6R4 - with overall responsibility for all but the car’s normally aspirated V6 engine and its systems and his book provides a candid view behind the scenes.

During the 1980s, ARG Group was using motorsport to promote some of their model range; Metro GTi, Maestro EFi and various Rover iterations, their dictum being ‘winning Sunday, selling Monday’. But the most formidable weapon in ARG’s arsenal was a bespoke Group B rally car to contest the World Rally Championship and designed by Williams Grand Prix Engineering and perhaps therein lay the anomaly. A car designed by people who didn’t develop it yet developed by people who didn’t design it, enter the precocious MG Metro 6R4.

Wynne’s fascinating and after almost 40 years, brutally honest story chronicles three year’s exhausting, expensive and often frustrating testing, and development carried out at MIRA, Cowley and in the field, both home and overseas, as well as the combative theatre of international rallying. The distinguished alumni of drivers Wynne worked with included Tony Pond, Marc Duez, Colin Malkin, Steve Soper, Malcolm Wilson, Jimmy McRae, and fellow Welshman David Llewellin, all with their own differing yet equally effective methodologies and techniques.

For homologation purposes a total of 200 6R4 cars were built by ARG with around 17 designated ‘works’ rally cars, with others bought by privateers or used as recce/practice cars. To 6R4 historians, registration numbers became well-known and, in some cases, iconic, although some cars were akin to Grandpa’s old axe with several body shell and engine changes and this book plots the history of these’ works’ cars.

Packed with 151 pages of vivid reminiscences, technical data and some great images, this specialised, and niche, soft-back book will appeal principally to past and present 6R4 owners - the car is now a desirable and valuable collectors’ car - as well as students of Group B’s comparatively short history.

Perhaps I’m a bit nerdy, but I found the journey through Wynne’s detailed project diaries a thoroughly absorbing read which provided background to the many headlines we remember reading during that heady period of international rallying. Costing £24.99 including first class postage, this self-published book is available via 6R4.net. Reinforcing Wynne Mitchell’s motorsport credentials, he has already successfully published two similar books with Steve Conry: The Sunbeam Lotus Story and The Avenger and Sunbeam Lotus Diaries.

The Metro 6R4 Diaries
Written by Wynne Mitchell and Steve Conry
Available from 6R4.net
Price £24.99