The Marina was a conventional design, a fully unitary spot-welded body (no sub-frames were used except on the six-cylinder) with a longitudinally mounted engine driving through the transmission and naked propeller shaft to a solid live rear axle suspended on semi-elliptic leaf springs with telescopic dampers. To ease production and reduce costs, the body featured a strong central spine around the transmission tunnel, where most of the unit's strength was. The rear dampers were inclined inboard from the axle to their top mounts on this spine, rather than being mounted vertically on dedicated top mounts built into the body at the rear-wheel arches. This limited the effectiveness of the dampers somewhat (they were dissipating vertical motion when mounted at an angle), and when combined with the live rear axle, made the rear end prone to "bump steer" on rough roads. A similar setup was used on the early Ford Escort for the same reasons of cost-effective construction, but Ford revised the arrangement on later models. BL lacked the funds to retool the Marina's design significantly, and so all models were fitted in this less-than-ideal way.