Classic MG

Introducing both Midget and 18/80 at the 1928 motor show was a turning point for MG. Cecil Kimber insisted on some firm orders at Olympia before committing to a big 2½litre 6-cylinder as the Edmund Road factory was made ready. A prototype 18/80 went on show with encouraging results, and the while the new car was not quite in the soon-to-be-vacated sporting territory of Bentley, it was more grown-up than most MGs. First to have the distinctive upright MG radiator shape that did so much to establish the identity of classic MGs, it was also the first 6-cylinder even though it continued using lots of Morris Motors’ components. Morris-derived engines in MGs had tended to be basic and side-valve, until the acquisition of Wolseley, along with Frank Woollard a former colleague of Kimber’s, who was made works manager. Woollard encouraged adventurous designs with an overhead camshaft, regarded by William Morris as a needless extravagance. Parsimonious Morris disapproved of the expense and the engine was never a success in Morrises. The 18/80 was treasury rated at 17.9hp but never attained anything like the 80bhp (60kW) implied in the title. About 60bhp (44.7kW) was its best ever. Advertisements claimed it had the sports performance and luxurious ease of a Two Thousand Guinea creation, “truly a competitor for the contemporary Alvis and Lagonda”. It was certainly a notable MG of the Vintage period, commendably smooth with strong torque and a surprisingly compliant ride. MG designed the chassis with 6in deep channel section side members and box-section cross-bracing, together with the axles although the torque tube transmission was pure Morris. One curiosity was the “MG” cast into the bulkhead uprights. It was neither octagonal nor could it ever be seen, except when the bodywork was entirely removed. Classic MG digital edition £7.56

BODY Saloon 4-door 4-seat; Sports 2-door 2-seats; Salonette 2-door 4-seats; Open Tourer 4-door 4-seats; chassis weight 19cwt (965.2kg), 2-seater 23cwt (1168.4kg), saloon 25.75cwt (1308.1kg) ENGINE 6-cylinders; in-line; 69mm x 110mm, 2468cc; compr 5.75: 1; 60bhp (44.7kW) @ 3200rpm; 24.3bhp (18.1kW)/ l. ENGINE STRUCTURE Duplex gear and chain-driven overhead camshaft; cast iron block, detachable cylinder head with pent-roof machined combustion chambers; two horizontal SU carburettors; chain drive to distributor, water pump, and dynamo , skew drive to oil pump and distributor; coil ignition; 4-bearing counterbalanced crankshaft. TRANSMISSION Rear wheel drive; five-plate cork insert clutch; 3-speed non -synchromesh manual gearbox; torque tube drive; spiral bevel final drive 4.25: 1. CHASSIS DETAILS Steel channel-section cross-braced upswept front and rear; upward-inclined half-elliptic leaf springs front-shackled 34in (86cm) front, 50in (127cm) rear; single arm Hartford Duplex shock absorbers; Perrot-shaft 12in (30cm ) finned drum brakes early cars, later cable brakes, some with servos; Marles steering; 10gal (45.5l) fuel tank; 2gal (9.1l) reserve; 19 x 5 Dunlop Fort tyres; Rudge-Whitworth centre lock wire wheels. DIMENSIONS Wheelbase 114in (289.6cm ); track 48in (121.9cm); turning circle 43ft (13m); ground clearance 8in (20.3cm); length 156in (396.2cm); width 60in (152.4cm); eight 62.5in (158.7cm) 2-seater, 67in (170.2cm). PERFORMANCE Max speed 80mph (128.7kph); 20.5mph (33kph)/ 1000rpm; 0-60mph 30sec; fuel consumption 18mpg (15.7l/ 100km). PRICE chassis only £ 420, 2-seater £ 480, Tourer £ 485, Salonette £ 545, Saloon £ 555 PRODUCTION 500
(Above right)The late Roger Stanbury’s Mk I speed model, black and red, chassis 6737, engine JC10532 first registered 10 June 1931 as a University Motors demonstrator. The other is my Twin-Cam 2.0 M-16 engined MGB.

Bentley Brooklands

I didn’t mean to praise Bentley quite so faintly. I liked Bentleys, but I guess in 1992 I felt compelled to emphasise Brooklands, since there really wasn’t much that was new about the car. They had taken the turbo off the Eight, as recounted in

The Complete Bentley also available as ebook THE COMPLETE BENTLEY.

available digitally for £12.31. After tax changes the price of the Brooklands came down to £87,500, making this essentially the entry-level Bentley. The press launch had been at Brooklands the previous month and they gave me a plaque to say I had driven a Bentley on such of the historic track that remained. This was before the developments that have taken place since, including the magnificent Mercedes-Benz World centre that opened in 2006. Perhaps I gave the Bentley less space that week because I wanted to highlight Saab’s research. I was coming round, even then, to the view that technology held the key to developments in driving we hadn’t even thought of. This was four years before Google had been invented and two decades away from driverless cars. You can now buy a Bentley Brooklands for the price of a well-used Mondeo.

BENTLEY INVOKES THE SPIRIT OF BROOKLANDS

It is not easy for an old aristocrat to recapture youthful vigour without losing some dignity. Bentley Brooklands has a fine alliterative ring for buyers tempted to a new non-turbocharged version of the old Bentley Eight at only £91,489. Its badges will be in traditional British racing green, to emphasise the connection with the track built by H F Locke King on his Weybridge estate in 1907. Brooklands was the cradle of motor racing, and Bentleys won stirring contests here, such as the six hours endurance race of 1929.

The 'Bentley Boys' wove themselves into the rich tapestry of Brooklands, dyed into the wool as indelibly as the Spitfires and Wellingtons created there by Vickers-Armstrong. Some Bentley Boys, like Clive Dunfee whose car topppled over the lip of the Members' Banking in 1932, lost their lives.

Brooklands is now a thriving industrial park. Gallaher's offices fill a gap in the Members' Banking, and one small corner is dedicated as a museum to halcyon days, when Locke King's estates extended not only to a large part of Surrey, but a good deal of Sussex as well.

The Bentley Brooklands is a magnificent anachronism, strong, quiet, powerful, and furnished in impeccable taste. Burr walnut, and deep Wilton carpet with tailored overmats give the interior the feel and the aroma of luxury. The loudest sound is not the clock - quartz movements no longer tick - but the faint creaking of the Connolly leather on the sumptuous upholstery. The huge 6.7litre V8 engine rumbles under the long bonnet, rejuvenated with the latest electronic technology, but still devoutly middle-aged. It is an imposing car, introduced just as Rolls-Royce and Bentley sales show signs of a recovery in Scotland and the North of England.

Rufus J Flywheel

It has taken me a long time to read Rufus J Flywheel on car names 19 January 2012 if you must know. He meditates, if that is the word for someone with a monicker that smacks of casually made up, on names. How easily the Dacia Lodgy could become Dodgy. Volkswagen’s Sharan Carat was close to Sharon Carrot and Mitsubishi’s Carisma didn’t have much.
Nothing’s new. Does he not remember Singer Vague and Humber Septic? Hillman Scavenger, Ford Crappi, Cretin (Cortina), Angular and Coarser (Corsair), or should Coarser be a Vauxhall? Rolls-Royce’s first idea for the Silver Shadow was Silver Mist until somebody told them Mist in German was something like MR2 in French.
CARkeys is a treasure-house. Well-written, well presented, up-to-date it has obscure material seldom found elsewhere, like David Finlay’s feature on a BMW based on the 1940 Mille Miglia 328. Shown as a Concept at scrutineering for the 2006 Mille Miglia, it was a bit like the real thing I drove in 1992 (left). I had it on good authority that the replica was a serious project at a time when quirky “future classics” were fetching silly prices, and BMW was tempted to follow Porsche with the 959 and make a few 328s. It didn’t last; Jaguar was among those that got into a muddle with the XJ220 and lived to regret it.

The 1940 BMW I drove to John o’Groats was insured for £2million even then, but what an exemplar it was. Lightweight, precise, stiff and quick I could have won the Mille Miglia in it. In 1940 it had been up against ponderous underpowered 2500cc Alfa Romeos, gaggles of Fiats and a couple of 815s cobbled-up by Enzo Ferrari, forbidden by his end-of-contract with Alfa to call them Ferraris. In 1938 Count Giovanni Lurani (an Anglophile, he affected the nickname Johnny Lurani and drove MGs) had suggested the race should move to Libya, Cyrenaica and Tripolitania having been taken from the Ottomans by Italy in 1912.
By1940 Libya was no longer an option so the April 28 race was truncated to nine times round a 104-mile circuit Brescia-Cremona-Brescia. Italy was still officially a non-belligerant but Germany had already invaded Poland and was busy assaulting Norway yet the race went ahead. BMW recruited Lurani (he ran with the hare and hunted with whatever hounds would let him drive racing cars), who acted as go-between in the Hotel Vittoria, where both German and French teams were staying but forbidden to meet because their nations were at war.

BMW won the race at a canter and all three roadsters survived the war. In 1945 H J Aldington of AFN in Isleworth, which imported BMWs (as Frazer Nash-BMWs) in the 1930s, went over ostensibly to reclaim a 328 he had left in Munich in 1939. He came back instead with one of the Mille Miglia cars to save it from the depredations of the occupying forces.
It was converted to right hand drive, equipped with a Frazer Nash radiator and displayed as a prototype. Production never prospered, it was sold to racing driver Gilbert Tyrer, and I saw it racing at Turnberry in 1952 and took it back there for the picture (left). In the 1960s, very down-at-heel, it was bought by my colleague on the road test staff of The Motor, Michael Bowler who restored it and sold it back to the BMW museum in the 1980s.

By the time it had been reconstructed by BMW it felt thoroughly modern. It was roomy and the gear lever was a bit long and springy - not quite the short stubby lever of contemporary sports cars - but the change was slick and precise. Steering was surprisingly light and although the springing was firm it probably felt luxurious in 1940 when sports cars were generally rough and ill-mannered. The classic tall 328 engine (above right)revved to 5,000rpm, with an emphatic crackle from the exhaust at 4,500.



The main disadvantage driving it round Scotland (that’s Ackergill Tower near Wick, above) was that you looked over, rather than through the windscreen and there was no hood. All very well in the sunshine of an Italian spring, but venturesome on the Lecht road by the ski-slopes in wintry May.

Biggles knew what he was about. Goggles and a leather helmet are necessary when your head is in the slipstream. A BMW motorcycle suit made a difference. Rain trickled onto my lap but an inner layer of Gore-tex and zips and studs made it all-of-a-piece, kept me dry in six hours' downpour but it did not protect my face. Snow and then hailstones evoked sympathy for grouse dodging grapeshot in August. Rufus J Flywheel would have a word for it.

Bentley Mulsanne

Friday Fact - According to Bentley Comms the flagship #Bentley #Mulsanne is named after the famous corner at the @LeMans24hour race - pic.twitter.com/RTVkWfJRPK. I thought it more likely it was named after the better-known Mulsanne Straight. I referred Bentley Comms to page 219’s reproduction of the famous Michael Turner painting of a Mulsanne Turbo on the famous Straight and presented to the Bentley Drivers’ Club on 17 June 1984 to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Bentley’s first win in the 24 Hours’ race. Went to Le Mans that year. Bentley Motors kindly presented me with a copy No 68/250 of a limited edition, signed by Michael, which hangs on my wall now. The Complete Bentley is £12.31 digitally on Amazon for Kindle.

Actively exhausting

Who now remembers basso profundo Triumph TR2s? At about 2,400rpm, as I recall, they made a deep crisp booming noise which, if you got it to coincide with a low bridge or a long retaining wall reverberated beautifully. You can scarcely imagine Canley engineers solemnly conspiring to provide it – maybe they did – but it was always tempting to accelerate in second or third gear to achieve the delightful crackle. This, you felt, was a sports car. Anybody overhearing must love it.
Well, they probably didn’t. They probably thought it was just a noisy car but aged 19 or 20 it didn’t occur to you that anybody could dislike it. They might as well not like Beethoven. Or the Beatles. TR2s weren’t very fast; 0 to 60 in 11sec and 105 or so mph, but they felt fast.One TR I knew well, (left) Ian Brown’s, OVD 888 on a Scottish Rally.
It’s different now. I don’t like noisy cars as much, but I have to make an exception for the F-type Jaguar. Engines nowadays are so muffled and de-toxed that crisp crackling exhausts are pretty well outlawed. The racket that thrills motor race spectators has been muted, so in an almost wholly successful effort to restore what was regarded as an essential feature of a sports car, Jaguar has what it calls an active exhaust system. Electronically controlled valves in it open to what Autocar described as their angry position, under hard acceleration or when the driver selects Dynamic on the touchscreen. A satanic roar, the testers said, at 4500rpm and a very lovely scream between 5000rpm and the red line.

Jaguar F-type. Silent when stopped.

Active Exhaust is reinventing what young “scorchers” had in the 1920s. Cut-outs enabled drivers to by-pass silencers at the touch of a switch or a lever, reducing back-pressure and squeezing out a few more precious horsepower for overtaking. Or simply making more noise. Jaguar doesn’t claim any extra bhp from “active” exhausts but it sounds magnificent. And you don’t need a low bridge to get the best out of it. TR2 rev counter on the right

100 BEST CARS

Mini, McLaren, Jaguar and Range Rover are easy leaders in Autocar’s list of Britain’s best-ever 100 cars. I’ve no problem endorsing the first couple of dozen but, notwithstanding Gordon Murray’s ingenious contribution, the Yamaha Motiv.e at 5 looks like lip-service to greenery-yallery. The Jaguar XJ220 also poses a question. It was neither a commercial nor technical success and needed a lot of fettling before it reached reality. Driving it was like looking at the world through a letterbox. The Aston Martins in the list are an odd bunch with no ground-breaking DB2, elegant DBS or Ian Callum DB7. Similarly it’s difficult to include a D-type Jaguar – OK on the Mulsanne straight but a bit of a handful on corners – and leave out the C-type which was more precise and exciting.
McLaren F1 (above): Collected daughter Joanna from school during my road test. She’s older now, still beautiful.
Austin-Healey Sprite. 71st. This was my second one at Turnberry. Wonderfully crisp, precise car.

Lotuses are questionable on grounds of quality and reliability but I’m surprised there is no Elan Plus2S. It was beautifully proportioned. I once did 300 miles in three hours with one. There you are the older I get the faster I was. I would not include any TVR; all I drove were just brute force and ignorance. Blower Bentleys were something of an aberration. I suppose they were glamorous but never won anything like the unsupercharged cars. Derby Bentleys are missing from the list. Surely the Silent Sports Car deserves better. Jensen-Healey – delete. Not well made, hastily modified and really quite dull. Same goes for the Daimler Dart SP250. The Edward Turner engine was ok but Daimler was so strapped for cash it had to cobble up a horrid plastic body that creaked and cracked.
One of my first drives in an E-type; Scottish Motor Show after introduction at Geneva in 1961 (below), with Jaguar apprentice Clive Martin.

No Bristols please. Except for the BMW-based 400 and the beautiful 404 they were heavy and lugubrious. I never went for the mystique so assiduously promoted by writers like the matchless Leonard Setright. Triumph Stag? I thought it was rubbish when I went on the press launch. Hillman Imp? I owned one and when it went it was OK; I drove it to Maranello where I had lunch with Enzo Ferrari, but it was not made very well. Same goes for any Avenger, even the Avenger Tiger. The press launch was on Malta where we couldn’t drive them far enough to grow suspicious of unreliability. The Morgan 3 wheeler or Plus 4 were fine, but the Plus 8 was where Morgan began to lose its way and power outstripped handling. I wouldn’t include a Delorean in any list except perhaps one on how not to develop a sports car. It was terrible. Reliant Scimitar? A definite maybe. Triumph TR5 - not bad until they put a wiggly independent back-end on making it pitch and curtsy. Triumph 1300 absolutely not. And why relegate the MGA to 95th? Shame

Range Rover. Deserves its place. Took this on the press launch by Goonhilly Down, 1970.



Love lists

Hillman Imp. On road test for The Motor with Penny Duckworth by door. Pre-launch picture so badges taped over.

100.Range Rover Evoque 99. Ginetta G40R 98. Vauxhall Astra 97. Marcos TSO 96. Honda Civic 95. MGA 94. Vauxhall Chevette HSR 93. Triumph Dolomite Sprint 92. Allard J2 91. Honda Jazz 90. Sunbeam Tiger 89. Nissan Juke 88. Invicta Black Prince 87. Noble M12 86. Lotus Carlton 85. Caterham Seven 160 84. Caparo T1 83. Rolls-Royce 10 HP 82. Triumph TR5 PI 81. Radical RXC 80. Triumph 1300 79. Daimler SP250 Dart 78. Morgan 4/4 77. Renault Megane RS 225 76. Noble M600 75. Lotus Sunbeam 74. Morgan Plus 8 73. BAC Mono 72. Gordon-Keeble 71. Austin-Healey Sprite 70. MGB GT 69. Bristol Fighter 68. Ford Cortina 1600E 67. Bowler EXR 66. AC Ace 65. Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow 64. Austin FX4 63. Napier-Railton 62. Caterham Supersport 61. Triumph 2000 60. Jaguar F-type 59. Morgan 3-wheeler 58. Reliant Scimitar 57. TVR Sagaris 56. Ford Escort RS2000 55. Bentley Continental GT 54. Ford Capri RS3100 53. Delorean DMC-12 52. Aston Martin V8 51. Ascari KZ1 50. Aston Martin V12 Vantage S 49. Subaru Impreza WRC 48. Hillman Avenger Tiger 47. Triumph Stag 46. Hillman Imp 45. Lister Storm 44. Rover P5B 43. Lotus Evora 42. Rover P6 3500S 41. Nissan Qashqai 40. Ariel Atom 39. Vauxhall Prince Henry 38. Aston Martin One-77 37. Rover 75 36. Jaguar XJ 35. Austin Seven 34. Bristol Blenheim 33. Lotus Cortina 32. Austin-Healey 3000 31. Aston Martin Vanquish 30. Lotus Seven 29. Land Rover 28. Jensen-Healey 27. Lotus Esprit 26. MG Midget 25. McLaren 12C 24. Morris Minor 23. Lotus Elan 22. TVR Speed 12 21. Rover SD1 20. TVR Chimaera 19. BMW Mini 18. Bentley Blower 17. Jaguar XF 16. Ford GT40 15. Rolls-Royce Phantom 14. Lotus Elise 13. Jaguar D-type 12. Ford Sierra RS Cosworth 11. Jensen FF 10. Ford Escort Mexico 9. TVR Griffith 8. Aston Martin DB5 7. Jaguar XJ220 6. McLaren P1 5. Yamaha MOTIV.e 4. Range Rover 3. Jaguar E-type 2. McLaren F1 1. original Mini

Works Austin-Healey 3000 rally car test. I am the fresh-faced youth.