“MG” was synonymous with “sports car” for several decades. It all started with the spidery TC, a 1920’s style roadster that American GIs discovered while stationed in the UK during WW2. A fair number made the trip back home with them, and the sports car boom was off and running (prior to the war, British sports cars were essentially unheard of in the US). The MG was affordable, afforded lots of driving fun, and had excellent resale value, all contributing to its best seller status.
The antique but charming TC begat the hugely popular TD, (1950-1953), followed by the TF (1953-1955), the last classically-styled MG, due to dithering by management on a truly new MG. It finally arrived for the 1956 model year, sporting a dramatically new aerodynamic body attached to a stiffer frame, front suspension and steering essentially borrowed from the TF, and the new 1489cc BMC B-series engine. With twin SU carbs, it sported all of 68 hp, but that was just enough to allow the MGA to hit a genuine 100 mph, no mean feat at the time for an affordable sports car.
My brother had a ’57 MGA in 1968—already on its last and leaky legs—and I spent quite a bit of time in the passenger seat as well as one memorable drive when I took it out when he was gone. So this review brings many of the sensations back to life for me, although not the rusted out rockers, shot shocks and the tired engine that didn’t want to rev past about 4500 rpm.
Yes, the new body was “controversial” given how iconic the traditional MG Midget T-Series roadsters had become. And yes, sports car aficionados are largely a curiously conservative crowd, not taking well to change. But SCI makes it clear that it takes only a drive around the block to recognize that it’s really all very familiar under that sleek new body: “noisy tappets, harsh ride, and loud exhaust…like its ancestors, it’s a whole lot of fun to drive in spite of—or maybe because of—its imperfections.”
Quick and light steering was a hallmark of MGs, introducing Americans used to mushy, slow and heavy steering to the joys (and kickback) of rack and pinion steering. Every pimple in the road could be felt through the rim of the big steering wheel. The short little stub of a shifter was a revelation to me on my illicit drive, so direct and notchy compared to the rather willowy shifter on a VW, never mind the column-mounted one on my dad’s ’68 Dart. The long-stroke four, which looked like it had been designed in the mid ’30s, throbbed as it chugged through the gears.
SCI summed it up concerning its ride: “it’s smooth on smooth pavement, and that’s all“. And there wasn’t much of that on the little winding, undulating country roads of North Baltimore County, where I took it on my drive. As to cornering, my brother had replaced the rotted recaps with the absolute cheapest new ones he could find at Montgomery Ward; they were extra-skinny and looked straight from 1949, when the molds were probably created. It took very little to provoke squeals of complaint and drifting. It’s as if it was set up to teach drifting at the lowest possible speeds.
Well, the doors may have closed with a “solid sound” back in 1957, but by 1968, the ones on my brother’s car were barely attached. And the rocker panels were completely rusted away; there was a 2-3″ gap between the bottom of the doors and the floor; convenient for the disposal of butts and roaches on the go.
The engine in this tester was obviously still in rude health, with its 101 mph run (at 5800 rpm); I doubt my brother’s A could top 75, maybe 80. 0-60 took 14.1 seconds, which wasn’t as bad in the mid-fifties as it sounds today. Driving an MGA with the top down always felt like you were going twice as fast as in reality. Actually, driving one with the top up was just as bad, if not worse, as it only contained the sounds of the straining engine. I have less than happy memories riding with my brother on a miserable cold, wet winter day, with whatever little heat there was escaping faster through the gaps in the top and side curtains (and the open rockers, despite attempts to stuff an old Army blanket in the gap), the little wipers mostly ineffective, never mind the defroster. Um; no fun at all. The MG was a fair weather friend.
SCI mused about the true top speed of the MG’s engine: essentially it would not really be able to ever see time in the highly optimistic red zone of its tachometer (6000-7000 rpm) as its valve gear was not up to the task of keeping the valves in place happily beyond 5500 rpm. SCI did see 5900 rpm on acceleration runs on a couple of occasions, “but retreated in haste”.
My brother’s engine finally croaked, a preview for the rest of the car. The cheapest solution was to yank the engine out of a Nash Metropolitan in a junkyard, which also used the B-series, and then put back the twin SU carbs. In any case, both of his engines seemed to be pretty knackered by 4500 rpm, maybe 5000 if really pushed.
The brakes came in for praise. Not from my brother, who had endless issues keeping their vital bodily fluids inside the master and wheel cylinders. But the hand brake, with its long handle was quite effective when the hydraulics gave out!
SCI found the top to be the PIA that it was, and the trunk space lacking in that quality, and the twin 6V batteries difficult to access. All true, and then some. But bopping out for a ride on a hot Baltimore summer night was intoxicating and highly memorable. I’m just glad it was my brother’s MGA and not mine. And yes, its next owner was the junk yard. It was replaced by an extremely reliable three-year old ’66 VW 1300.
related reading:
CC MG-A: The Almost Great Leap Forward
I am pretty sure I will never own an MGA, but they look like such fun from the outside. To me, this is the essence of a sports car – a slow car that is fun to drive fast. In its day not much in the US could give you that direct connection to the road. So a lot of compromises, but what it did it did really well.
The only MG I have ever ridden in was a 30s PB Midget ( the one with the OHC Morris Minor engine) , owned by a school-friend who left early to join the Metropolitan Police. In later times he would taunt me ( still in school with a side-valve Ford) by visiting with his Lotus 7 or Big Healey.
I can still remember the shock when the MGA was unveiled. Apparently the ‘A’ was one of the best handling cars of its’ time.
Never had one of these, but I did have a 1966 Datsun 411 with the J engine which was a outright copy of this sorry lump of pushrod cast iron.
I always think of the MGA whenever I see some old rich dude in a Ferrari tip toeing along at low speed. Driving a slow car fast is way more fun than driving a fast car slow.
And that’s even more true on a motorcycle, the truth of which was impressed upon me by a 1969 BSA Royal Star (500cc) that I owned. It looked exactly like the 650’s, but had exactly half the horsepower and all the handling. Which meant you ran it full throttle all the time without ever getting in over your head.
We still see them on the classic circuit, but next to an MGB they look old. However, they do generate a strong loyalty and have a good following, even if they are always overshadowed by the B.
Ironic, as there’s little in the B that couldn’t have been done in 1956
I’ve had the good fortune to own several MGs throughout my life time. I currently own an MGA, an MGB and A MGCGT. My favorite is the MGA. It is tunable, handles well, and is what I consider to be one of the most beautiful sports cars ever made. With a little work, they will happily rev over 7000. As Kent Prather told me, it is a good autocrosser!
My other cars include a BMW M3, a 36 Ford Streetrod, an early Miata.
Hello. What Bob Shaw is this? I imagine the one from Lincoln NE, who autocrossed (?) his great old MGA has gone on to the next world. He was older than me, and fewer people are every day.
My dad had a 1959 MGA: BRG with white interior. He got it around 1965. Mom relented in letting him have it because he was one of those dashing Navy aviators. He was friends with someone in the motor pool in RI who actually liked working on these cars (syncing those carbs) and I remember it spent a lot of time plugged into his battery charger in the one car garage. His younger brother (Uncle Jim) noted that ‘the country that built the MG, it is a miracle they won the Battle of Britain.’ His beater car was a 1948 Plymouth sedan which was a big as a house to me, but when we moved down to Pensacola in 1966 he paid someone to drive it down where it spent more time on the charger. In late 1967 was the last time I saw the car was when dad left to go to Atlanta for an interview with Delta Air Lines. When the rest of us moved up there 3 months later after pop joined up to DAL, he was driving a pea/puke green 1st gen Ford Falcon. Dad had some mixed feeling about owning it, but decades later he now has a ’94 Mercury Capri two-seater convertible (the coupe de rouge) which he said has a harsher ride (but then again pop is past 80). I remember that the car had no door handles and you had to reach in and push down on a chain inside the door. It was a beautiful car to look at. His second wife when he met her around 1972 she was driving a MGB which were common around Atlanta and didn’t seem quite as cool as Dad’s MGA. My step-mom sold the car around 1977, but at least I got to drive that a few times (dad showed me how to ride the clutch at a stop light instead of using the brake). But that was a long time ago. The Capri has fewer issues fortunately.
That Lucas ad is hypnotic. I love old ephemera on the internet, and I’ve never seen one before.
It’s funny that Morgans are famous for their wooden body-framing when you consider that the T-series Midgets all had wooden body frames too. Even the MGA with its envelope body still came with plywood floor-boards and seat tracks fastened with wood screws.
https://www.hutsonmoco.co.uk/mgtd
https://mgaguru.com/mgtech/frame/fr110.htm
Oddly enough, there was a time when I was all about British roadsters. The interesting thing about MG is that they made very ambitious, technically adventurous, high performance sports-racing cars…before WWII. Overhead cams? Independent rear suspensions? Supercharging? They had all that…before WWII. They built stuff that competed with some Bugattis. Take a look at a 1935 MG R-Type if you only think of MGs as the most generic brand of tractor-engined, lever-arm-dampered coal-carts. Alfa-Romeo also drastically reduced its technical ambitions after WWII, but even their mass-market cars retained features of the elite motor cars they built prior to hostilities.
Such a lovely-looking motor, here at its best in vented steel wheels, and the whitewalls so disdained in the country in which it was made but so aesthetically perfecting in the country in which it had to actually sell. How on earth the bird-struck grille on the MK2 was supposed to improve the whole is not fathomable.
That B-series engine contained intimations of the mortality that would befall MG and the industry surrounding it. New it may have been, but it wasn’t good enough. Too heavy, too long in the stroke, and, as the article implies, needing head work amounting to the most difficult of brain surgery to make it breathe a bit easy. Not the art in its best state, that.
Yet again, the writing here has such appeal. “The throttle linkage is devious……Abingdon’s engineers could have devised a more direct connection, though this one works very well.” Faint praise of the classiest type, said surely by Borgeson staring in wonder at yet another English engineering solution to a problem not obvious to everyone else. And I mean, “devious”! The whole review abounds with such little gems.
Please Sir, may we have some more?
I bought one of these after returning to the states from Vietnam in ’68. It was a solid 1957 MGA which spent its 76K miles in central California. I bought it for $300. I was assigned to a Satellite ground station at an Army camp near San Luis Obispo and spent a couple of months in the base auto garage removing all the trim and painting the chalked red body to BRG and fixing the black interior. I did a lot of mail order with Moss Motors and MG Mitten! It looked quiet the machine from 10 feet away. Except for the rebuild of the tranny, I never had any problems with the MGA. However, that winter was one of the wettest in history and the top leaked something horrible. Most of my driving was with a collection of rags and a poncho on my lap to keep dry. Come spring, I loved running up and down twisty State route 46 from Cambria to Bakersfield. The week I was discharged, I sold it to another GI for a grand- whom I understand, promptly trashed it.