There may have been a place for another full-size car in the Australian market during the Seventies. There may have been an appetite for an advanced competitor to the Ford Falcons, Holden Kingswoods and Chrysler Valiants, especially if it proved more economical and better built. There may have been a place for the Leyland P76 when it was introduced 50 years ago, had things not gone awfully wrong for the car that has since become the butt of many an Australian automotive enthusiast's joke.

Before the 1968 merger of Leyland Motors and British Motor Holdings that formed British Leyland, BMC's Australian arm did a brisk business selling the Mini and a range of other economical cars. Despite the success of the lineup, limited parts sharing among BMCA's cars hurt profitability, so David Beech and his colleagues at BMC's Australian arm formed a plan to design and build two cars by and for the Australian market: a mid-size car to be released in 1973 and a full-size family car a year later.

Beech, however, was taken aback by the merger and the swift decision to greenlight the Marina, a car that fit neatly into his team's plans for the mid-size car. Those plans allowed the team to focus all of their resources on the full-size car. Those resources weren't vast: His initial request for an AU$30 million budget got whittled down to AU$21 million, which was to cover both development of the car and refurbishment of an existing assembly line in the company's Zetland factory previously used for building small cars. Internally designated YDO26 (for a sedan version) and YDO27 (for a coupe version), the full-size car was given the nod by British Leyland in England in late 1968.

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