British Leyland would often take one giant step forward, followed by two steps back, with its brilliant and often revolutionary ideas often ruined through penny-pinching, slipshod execution and corporate backbiting.

Whilst acquiring the tooling for what would become the Rover V8 engine is one of the crowning achievements of the British motoring industry as a whole, a lack of understanding of just how groundbreaking the engine was and the potential it unlocked at the boardroom level would stymie the company.

Perhaps the greatest example of this outside of the infamous decision not to use the Rover V8 in the Triumph Stag was perhaps best epitomised in a potential supercar that Rover never sold.

Known internally as the Rover P6 BS (for Buick Special), Spen King designed a lightweight mid-engined supercar designed to truly test the potential of the new Rover V8 and potentially even compete with the Lamborghini Miura.

The prototype was remarkably clever, with wedge styling at least a decade ahead of its time, the V8 engine mounted just off-centre enough to make it more compact and a repositioned gearbox from a Rover V6 tasked with driving the wheels.

With a top speed of 140mph in 1967, it was utterly beloved by test drivers and the motoring press that got a chance to try the prototype.

Unfortunately, corporate politics would ultimately halt the car’s production before it could even start. The renamed Leyland Eight GE, thanks to the formation of the monolithic British Leyland, would be redesigned into the even more beautiful Rover P9 before being cancelled so as not to compete with the Jaguar E-Type.

Whilst the engine’s potential was finally realised by the incredible Range Rover, the tragedy of the Rover P9’s cancellation would ultimately lead to the slow decline of the Rover marque as a whole.

Eventually, other British sports cars such as the Triumph TR8, the MGB GT V8 and many fantastic TVR models would show the true potential of the Rover V8 as a sports car engine, but the P9 had so much potential.