IF this car could talk, it would tell you what hell is like. Built and targeted at wealthy, car-savvy buyers, the Riley 2.5 litre was a model chosen by people who also looked at Rovers and Jaguars.

A typical owner would be a family man in an upmarket house in an eastern Sydney sub-urb, or near the bay in Brighton in Melbourne’s south-east.

But this car didn’t get the life of Riley. It ended up in a tortuous relationship with an owner who pushed its mechanical limits through three gruelling Australian long-distance rallies.

That owner in 1950 was Keith Jones, then an alderman on the Auburn Council in Syd-ney and the owner of a transport company.

The Riley 2.5 litre sedan was considered a luxury car that costed more than twice that of the recently-introduced Holden sedan. This English-built car’s strongest export market, incidentally, was Australia.

The graceful car, initially green but later repainted to grey, Riley had its first inkling that its life would be no picnic when, in 1952, Mr Jones entered it into the Mt Druitt race.

This race was an up-and-back event on an old airstrip. The Riley came second, a com-mendable outcome and Mr Jones was so inspired by the car’s potential that he entered it for the 1953 Redex Trial.

It was dubbed the “round Australia” rally but came nowhere near Western Australia, cov-ering 10,500km from Sydney and heading to Brisbane, Townsville, Darwin, Alice Springs, Adelaide and Melbourne before returning to Sydney.

Alongside the Riley and Mr Jones was his son Kim and mate Peter Webber. Together, they brought the car home in 75th position from a field of 192 cars.

The rally was fast and brutal, especially for a car that was designed and built as a luxury car and not a competition machine. It also had an ash body frame, sitting on top of a steel ladder chassis.
That led some wags to suggesting that it was fortunate the rally was so fast because if it was slower, termites in the Australian outback could have taken hold and dined on the wood frame.
The Redex rally was tough but the Riley was relatively new at only three years old. In 1970, it was a different story.

The Ampol Trial was a east-coast event over 10,200km and used a two-man crew that was both tiring on the competitors and led to the Riley becoming lost, though it finished.

By now the car was 20 years old, competing against Toranas, Monaros and a host of Dat-suns.

Nine years later it was back playing with the big boys again, including eventual winner Peter Brock in the latest Commodore with full support from Holden. Against this behe-moth, the ever-reliable, gracefully-aging Riley, finished its last major event.
Though Mr Jones and the Riley competed in various 24-hour Castrol rallies and the South Australian State Rally of 1996, nothing eclipsed the Redex and Ampol-sponsored torture tests.
The car remains a legend. Now in the hands of a Perth collector, complete with decals reminiscent of its glory days, it stands looking both proud and beaten.
Open the door and the richness of the leather wafts out, mixed with that dusty earth smell embedded even after the intervening 70 years. So entrenched is its history that some people could probably smell Alice Springs in the cabin.
Echoes of the past remain. There is the original route winder mounted on the transmis-sion tunnel ahead of the gear shift lever, with the names of the towns hand-written on the paper roll along with the distances before the next route change.
The analogue timers remain on the dashboard, the navigator’s reading light and the an-cillary gauges.
There are significant differences between this 1950 Riley and any siblings. There are four fuel tanks with their fillers sprouting from the boot lid and rear fenders with two elec-tric fuel pumps with two extras on standby.
Timber capping on the door frames, real wood across the dashboard are original but the half-cage roll bars are not.
One giveaway is the addition of four driving lights – incidentally French units that sit un-comfortably bright on the very English car – and the extremely rare “Ampol” rally badges on the grille.
The tyres are heavy-duty ply units on 16-inch steel wheels. Beneath the split-fold bonnet is the original 2.5-litre four-cylinder engine with its bright aluminium twin covers, making it look like a twin overhead cam engine.
In fact, the covers are for a less sophisticated overhead-valve arrangement, though this is fed from two camshafts mounted halfway up – and on opposite sides of the engine – pow-ering short pushrods in a layout termed “high cam”.
Post-manufacture additions include the vacuum-assist brake and a heavy-duty air clean-er.
Otherwise, it is a well-used, perhaps abused, example of a luxury British saloon that is a pensioner at aged 70 years. How have the years and competition treated it? Surprisingly well.
It has all the trappings of a post-war sedan. The bonnet is long and the driver’s seat, ac-cessed through coach (suicide) doors, is low with a broad, ivory (actually not real ivory) steering wheel with chrome horn rings.
The yellowed faces of the gauges look like the pages of a centuries-old tomb, the dull once-white switchgear showing age and weariness, though there is a vigour in the en-gine after its slow crank speed.
First impressions aren’t great. The engine feels lethargic even after a decent warming up. The steering wheel sits on my chest and the windscreen is intimately close. Down the long driveway it begins its “singing” – the gentle creak, squeak and groan as the body and chassis move subtly in different directions under pressure from the road surface and the suspension stretches.
But it feels capable and inspires confidence. It sits solidly on the road and the rack and pinion steering is positive, both unusual features in a car of this age. The ride quality, de-spite the age and endurance history, is remarkably smooth and compliant.
Then the engine begins to show its attributes. Its main strength is its smoothness and unerring torque, the latter allowing it to skip downchanges through corners and yet allow it to pull hard towards the end of its rev range.
The Riley 2.5 litre, known until 1952 as the RMB and launched in November 1946, fol-lowed and was then sold alongside the 1.5-litre RMA version that was a bit older after an August 1945 debut. The cars were upgraded in the 1950s before being replaced by the Pathfinder.

ENDS

Specifications

Make: Riley
Model: 2.5 Litre
Model code: RMB
Year: 1950
Price new ($A): $1900

• Engine: 2.5-litre 4-cyl
• Valves: 2 x high cam, OHV, 8-valve
• Bore/stroke: 80.5 mm x 120 mm
• Comp. ratio: 6.8:1
• Aspiration: normal
• Power: 75 kW @ 4400 rpm
• Torque: 182 Nm @ n/a
• Power-to-weight: 50.9 kW/tonne
• Fuel: 2 x SU carburettors
• Fuel tank: 57 litres (120 litre option)
• Fuel thirst: 14 litres/100 km
• Transmission: 4-speed manual
• Drive: Rear
• 0-100km/h: 17 sec
• Top speed: 160 km/h

Dimensions:

• Length: 4724 mm
• Width: 1613 mm
• Height: 1550 mm
• Wheelbase: 3023 mm
• Track (ft/rr): 1327 mm/1327 mm
• Weight: 1486 kg

Chassis:

• Suspension (ft/rr): ind, wishbones, torsion bar/live axle, leaf springs
• Brakes: (ft/rr): hydro-mechanical drum/drum
• Steering: Rack & pinion
• Wheels: 16-inch steel
• Tyres: 4.50 x 16