Thousands of unsold Rover cars are stockpiled at two disused north Oxfordshire airfields.

Car distributor Axial, which is storing the cars at the former military bases at Upper Heyford and Chipping Warden, has been left with the job of tracking the histories of thousands of vehicles, said to be worth up to £100m, and working out who owns them.

Axial spokesman Mark Morgan said: "We're storing about 3,500 new Rovers at Upper Heyford and another 3,500 ex-hire cars at Chipping Warden. About 70 per cent of the new cars are unsold.

"Obviously, we're working with the administrators to decide where these cars will go from here."

Cars piled up at storage points across the country after dealers accused managers of Britain's last volume car maker of dumping cars on them before finally going into liquidation with the loss of 5,000 jobs.

Administrators PricewaterhouseCoopers are planning a sell-off of Rover's stock of cars, with discounts likely to be up to 45 per cent.

Meanwhile, 26 redundant former staff at Oxford's Rover dealership, Phoenix Venture Motors, in Banbury Road, have learned from administrators that they must join the queue of creditors in order to receive even a small proportion of last month's wages and commission on cars sold.

In order to boost cashflow, Rover offered sales staff as much as £1,000 commission on certain cars last month, but now they are unable to collect the money.

The company also offered discounts of up to 28 per cent.

A former employee said: "I know one salesman who sold nine cars last month and was hoping for high commission. It's bad for sales people, because they rely heavily on commission and work hard to get it."

Employees of PVM, which was owned by MG Rover, and went into administration last week, are even worse off than the 5,000 workers made redundant at the company's Longbridge plant, as they will not benefit from the Government's £150m assistance package.

Among names mentioned in the Financial Times as possible buyers of the MG badge and assets is former Oxfordshire racing tycoon Tom Walkinshaw, whose company TWR went into liquidation last year, leaving many workers unpaid.

The wife of a former TWR employee who was owed six months' salary said: "I think it very strange that Mr Walkinshaw could be in the running to buy MG."