Porsche Enthusiasts Club Forum

I know of some that have done 120K plus never been touched, others at around 20K or so. The design is a bit poor in that the thermostat faces the other way to most cars so maybe something to do with warm up cycles. I know Ford were less than impressed when they bought LR & got the Freelander. If a HG failed then the dealers used to swap the engine & a lot of the "new uprated" stuff was done by Ford engineers to fix it.
I remember when I was building the TR7 lump, I was at Progress Engineering & a guy came in with a 1.4 that they were buying for bits. Apparently female owner had hit another car up the ar5e & crunched the rad. Police came out & sorted the details & owner asks copper if it's OK to drive home around 14 miles . Reputedly the copper ignores the antifreeze mix all over the place & says yes! It was glowing by the time she got home Talking to Simon he said they TIG the heads up, skim them & rebuild 'em & had never seen one back.

I had the 1.4 16v version in a Metro Gti. That was a fantastic little car, with a cracker of an engine in a light body (and getting lighter all the time ). It was just a smidgeon slower than our S2 up to about 80 and would do over 40mpg on a run. It's headgasket did fail at 111k miles but I couldn't tell you how long the replacement would have lasted because some 14 year old joyrider nicked it and stuffed it into a lamp post

didn't the 1.4 k series have the head bolts that went thro' the block and held the main bearing holders in place ?

It sure did, great engine, except for the early headgasket problems.



A ZR touring auto would be an ideal replacement for the freelander

They all do, it's a girdle that holds the main bearings & is held in by head bolts going all the way down.

Not sure it was only the early cars that suffered from the head gasket. My Brothers 2004 car went at 40K, My neighbours 2003 lasted 60K.

Didn't do much for the rover reputation

I recently passed on one of those for £500, and it was very tidy with about 75k on the clock. Was I daft?

That was exactly the car I had as a teenager! I keep telling my wife it was a lovely thing (and the reason I bought her a Metro as her first car) but she’ll hear none of it …

Was a gorgeous wee machine for a 17/18 year old to drive. Mine was red with red seatbelts, little air vents on the bonnet, stiffened suspension, close-ratio gearbox, the lot. Well, I say mine, it was actually my Stepmum’s company car, but she only took it for me to drive. I used to do a lot of motorway miles in it, Hull to Preston and back most weekends!

i had a '94 420GSI with the m series engine, at 12 months old it had a new engine under warranty, 12 months later the head gasket went, head skimmed and £1200 bill, and never ran well after that so dropped it for a mundano, never missed a beat

M Series derived from the O series.
Had a Morris Ital 2 Litre O series Auto estate NMO713X as a co.car. Pads lasted around 4,000 miles, damn quick.... when it went. Loaned it to a mate who had a 2 litre Capri, he came back absolutely white! Apparently at the first roundabout he'd run out of brakes & decided his Capri would go round it at that speed & came out of the roundabout sideways! It used to be serviced at the garage my Dad worked at. The guys used to bring the discs off into Dad to show him. They were always knackered & bright blue! And that was every 6K.

my dad had a marina 1.8 estate OWL66M, that was reasonably quick, but used to leave a cloud of blue smoke behind it especially on quick get-aways, in those days we gave names to cars, the marina was called the 2 stroker

Is that because you liked 2 stroke 'er?

only on friday nights