The old Rover K Series 4-cylinder engine was designed with a very small coolant capacity to make it more efficient. However, the ‘O’ ring gaskets between the cylinder head and the water-heated inlet manifold eventually fail, the coolant leaks and, because the capacity of coolant is small, this rapidly leads to overheating and failure of the cylinder head gasket or worse. Knowing the engine had this fault, in your case, Rover’s brilliant engineers fitted it with a turbocharger that runs red hot a lot of the time.

In my experience a car that has suffered a failed head gasket is never right again, so my advice is to get rid of it. Even repaired it’s only worth about £1,500. The curious thing is that the Chinese have taken this same engine and designed a range of cars around it. Maybe the have solved the ‘O’ ring problem. Maybe no one in China dares to complain.