Hillman Hunter: the marathon winner that motorised Iran (1966–1979)

Few family saloons carry two stories this big. The Hillman Hunter, flagship of the Rootes Group’s 1966 Arrow range, won the brutal 10,000-mile London to Sydney Marathon outright in 1968, and then lived a second life as the Paykan, Iran’s national car, built in Tehran until 2005 in numbers that dwarf everything Ryton managed. At home the fleets, the driving schools and the scrapyards consumed almost every example within a generation, which makes today’s rare survivors small celebrities carrying a genuine hero’s back-story to every show they attend.

The Arrow family

The Hunter launched the Rootes Group’s last all-new design: the Arrow, a light, crisply drawn saloon and estate platform that served half the group’s badge ladder. The Hunter led on volume, a cheaper Arrow carried on the Minx name below it, the Singer Gazelle’s Vogue sister took the walnut trim, the fastback Sunbeam Rapier went sporting, and the Humber Sceptre topped the range in velour. Some 470,000 UK Arrows were built through 1979, the last years badged Chrysler as the old group’s identity faded, and the Hunter outlived every marque that made it, a distinction it shares with very few cars anywhere. Saloons dominated; the light, useful estates are today’s rarities.

Marathon glory: London to Sydney

The Hunter’s finest hour came against the odds: for the 1968 London to Sydney Marathon, a 10,000-mile flat-out dash across Europe, Asia and Australia, the works entered Hunters against factory teams with far deeper pockets, and Andrew Cowan’s car, shared with Colin Malkin and Brian Coyle, took outright victory. The result stunned the sport, put the quiet fleet saloon on every front page in the country for a week, sold a generation of twin-carburettor Hunter GTs on reflected glory, and remains one of British rallying’s great giant-killings. The Holbay-tuned GLS of 1972, with its twin Webers, Rostyle wheels and 93 bhp, pushed the road car close to the 100 mph mark and completes the model’s small, sought-after sporting tier.

The Paykan: Iran adopts the Hunter

Nothing in the Arrow story matches what happened next: Iran National began assembling Hunters in Tehran in 1967 as the Paykan, and the car simply became Iran, its taxi, its family saloon, its cultural shorthand, built with growing local content decades after Ryton stopped, until production finally ended in 2005. Over two million Paykans were made, several times the British total, spawning pick-up variants, a national repair culture and decades of affectionate folklore, giving the modest Hunter a claim few British cars of any price can match: it motorised an entire nation, and its museum examples on two continents are honoured accordingly.

From Rootes to Chrysler: the long fade

The Hunter’s home-market years traced its maker’s decline: Chrysler completed its takeover of Rootes in 1967, a year into Arrow production, and the range soldiered on through badge changes, strikes and shrinking investment, the Hillman name itself retired in 1976 and the final cars sold as Chrysler Hunters, assembled latterly in Ireland until 1979. None of that stopped the car working: it stayed a fleet and minicab staple to the end, CKD kits went out to assembly lines from New Zealand to South Africa, and the design’s sheer simplicity kept it profitable long after its glamour had gone. The last British-designed Rootes car outlasted the group, both its American owner’s patience and, in Tehran, the century.

What a Hunter is like to drive

The Hunter drives lighter than its era suggests: the 1725 four is willing and torquey, the shell weighs remarkably little, the controls are easy and the balance honest rear-drive simple, with the GT and GLS adding genuine briskness to the same friendly recipe. Period road tests praised exactly this unassuming competence, and the same virtues make survivors friendly classics today: parts-shared mechanicals a home mechanic can service on a Saturday, room for the family and their luggage, and motorway pace held without strain or drama. It never dazzled anybody, which is precisely how it survived 10,000 punishing miles to Sydney when faster and cleverer cars broke by the roadside.

Buying a Hunter today

Finding one is the genuinely hard part: fleet attrition and tin worm consumed the type so thoroughly that the owners club knows the survivors individually, and patience beats budget in any search. Inspect sills, floors, wheelarches, spring hangers and screen surrounds, verify GT and GLS authenticity against club records because badges migrate onto humbler cars, and prize completeness of trim above shiny cosmetics. Mechanical parts flow through the shared Rootes network. Auction data is genuinely thin, a £7,800 median across only a handful of measured sales, so the club market sets the real-world prices: projects near £1,500, good cars £4,000 to £9,000, the sporting rarities beyond £12,000, and every one of them trailing a marathon and a nation in its story.

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