Rover 216SE Coupe (TomCat) Review 

Nice i love that purple colour i think it was called Amaranth. Nice colour and quite rare. Great cars and now starting to be see as classics at last.

The 220! Oil seals by any chance?

@@cookoncars8059 it was the 220, but it was the head gasket that failed - didn't get it uprated the first time it went which was an error...

Wasn't the 220 T series? I thought the only went up to 1.8.

Yeah i know it was only due to my mic going down so all the sound is from the camera its been as heavely edited as possible. But we were never completly happy with the final edit. But thats life, hope you enjoyed the content though.

Theres an R reg one exactly like this on ebay now for £4000,

How sad, but trees do tend to win! 😉😆

@@cookoncars8059 they do lol 😃 I was 19 at time side off car wasn't stright after I hit tree it had wrapped it self round tree

No that’s wrong, they were all Tomcats. We had tracer and tex as the cabrio and convertible too… they were factory code names

TOMCAT is the code name for the racing project running for 24 hours on the bowl at millbrook proving ground. They smashed many records!

@@cookoncars8059 All that from a n/a 1.6! Amazing!

Tomcat was the 220 coupe turbo. 2l t16.

Tomcat was the in-house project name for the 200 coupe, the racing series was named after. The press got hold of the name early in development and printed a partially disguised picture with the headline “Rovers new Tomcat Coupe” 👍🏼

No tthis one, post 96 models had K series engines from Rover

That's were your wrong. Cars of this era used many parts from other manufacturers

@@henriquemagalhaes3062 by post 1996 you mean 1996 included? I’m looking to buy one and I’m not sure if the one I found fits the d16a6 or the 16k4f…

I would agree, however things have moved on massively since the late 90s and early 2000s, the issue was with the type of head gasket, and the fact that rover used a blue coolent, which caused the head gasket to rot if not changed every year. However now you can get kevlar head gaskets, and a much less corrosive coolent, which fixes the issue, this rovers head gasket was last changed in 2005 and is still very much working fine. Its done over 50,000 miles on the same gasket. This issue was resolved mainly to lotus taking on the K series engines in there lotus elise and exige. It was really an engine ahead of its time and died out due to not having a better engineered head gasket. Still the amount of power you could get from a K series has always been a pretty amazing thing at the time.

@@cookoncars8059 worked on plenty of lotus,s in the past and land rovers kseries was mainly the issue !!! Thats probably why i still would,nt trust A K SERIES VEHICLE......

Earlier models had a 1.6 Honda engine instead of a rover.

Head gasket failure on these was down to Rover's decision to use plastic/poly dowels for the head, but repair and replacement is relatively easy and relatively cheap; hardly something that'd put me off owning one. 99% of "performance" cars of this era will have similar issues, I have a couple of classic Preludes with the 2.2 VTEC and that has its own set of problems that are far more expensive to address than the Rover, i.e. ABS pump failure, 4ws rack, stuck valves/valve clearance. If I owned a 30 year old car, and the biggest issue was a head gasket that more than likely would have already been done, I don't think I'd grumble much.