Rover 214 GSi | Shed of the Week

What does fuel injection have to do with the first Gulf War? Shed explains...

If your mind is old enough, please cast it back 35 years to January 1991. What were you doing then? If you were on the line at Rover’s Longbridge plant in Birmingham you might have just spent your day putting the finishing touches to the car you’re looking at here. Satisfied with your day’s toil, you would have been looking forward to an evening sat in front of The Darling Buds Of May with the missus and a can or two of Harp lager. In Shed’s case, 1991 would have marked his first viewing of Bottom with the postmistress (yes, it has been going on that long) with a lovely stiff tincture in his hand.

The ‘GSi’ in this 214’s name meant it was quite posh. Not quite as posh as the SEi which had half-leather seats, but two levels posher than the basic 214i. The ‘i’ meant it was injected, which might not seem that big a deal when you remember that the first British production car to feature petrol injection had gone out of production 23 years previously, and that the car that spawned a whole new genre of sporty hatchbacks had leapt onto the stage a full 15 years earlier. In early ’91, however, UK motorists’ minds were being focused more on high mpg than high performance, the date of this car’s first registration coinciding pretty much exactly with the start of the Gulf War. Amid uncertainty about fuel supplies, injection provided some reassurance on the economy front as well as a promise of smooth and mainly uninterrupted running.

We don’t know how much of a Trigger’s broom this car will be 35 years on, but if the components are in anything like factory spec it will be a nice little thing to drive. Introduced in 1988 when British Aerospace bought the Rover Group, the 1.4-litre 16-valve K16 engine in this car was a sweet unit. We’re told it’s just been serviced, that everything works and that it’s the 90hp single-point injection model as opposed to the multipoint 102hp. 90hp might not seem a lot today, but then again neither does the 214’s weight of not much more than one tonne, unencumbered as it is by much in the way of crash protection hardware. Shed has never been a big fan of this type of secondary safety. He prefers the primary safety of decent handling that stops him from having a crash in the first place. In terms of top speed you won’t be impressing many folk, the 1.4 just about making it into three figures, but the 11-second (just) 0-60mph time will feel reasonably trouser-fluttering.

There are only two MOT tests to look at: the one it’s just passed with no advisories, and the one before that in 2024 which generated nothing more than a few mumbled comments about the odd bit of rust. The lack of history is a consequence of the low mileage of course. It’s not passed the 22,000-mile mark yet, and that’s reflected in the condition and the absence of major MOT moanings. It will become exempt from testing in five years’ time and there’s no reason to suppose it won’t survive that long if it’s kept under cover.

The bonnet looks like it might have been left off the latch for the pics, which is a shame as it makes it look like the car might have biffed something. The uniformity of the shutlines on both sides of the bonnet combined with the strong likelihood of county-sized gaps being maintained between the Rover and anything in front of it suggests it’s just off the latch. If it has had a bump then that would surely have been the most accurate crash in motoring history.

Having bought the car for £1,995 or less, your first and possibly only purchase would probably be an industrial-sized tub of Back To Black, or possibly Grey if that exists, to restore the vast expanses of rough trolley-deflecting plastic to the same colour as the bit on the rear panel where the UK sticker used to be. Applied with the sort of enthusiasm that Shed normally reserves for lubricating the postmistress’s trunnion, which as those of you old enough to remember the Longbridge days will know is one part of a rotating joint where the shaft is inserted into a cylinder, you will almost certainly end up with one of the best examples of the ten Rover 214 GSis that are currently legal to drive in the UK.

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bmv6197

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