Classics Worldの November 2021 の目次

Welcome to what I hope you’ll find is a bumper issue of Classics Monthly, thanks largely to our major feature pitching 11 MGs against 11 Triumphs in an epic battle for superiority. Of course, rivalry between the MG and Triumph camps has been fierce in the past, sometimes to the point of acrimony, but these days while that rivalry is alive and well, it tends to be far more relaxed, a little light-hearted ribbing to add spice to a shared passion for classic cars. And it is in the spirit of fun rather than confrontation that we approached the subject, so hopefully it won’t bruise too many egos along the way. I like to think that I am reasonably impartial in this particular fight. After all, I edited MG Enthusiast…

Thanks for the consistently high quality of your magazine, which I await with eagerness each month. The article on the Hillman Imp a while ago stirred up some fine memories of this underrated compact car. The Imp had been below my radar as a young lad who was more tempted by the trendy celebrity of the Mini. Yet a test drive in a locally-advertised C-reg 1965 Super Imp selling for £130 (this was 1973) revealed it was nippy, cornered on rails, had a top speed of 90mph and fuel consumption of 40-45mpg. I was won over and parted with the cash, equivalent to two month’s take-home pay. My joy was unconfined, until someone said to me: 'Isn’t that Liz’s old Imp? Did she have trouble with that!' I then embarked…

The sound of a Morris Minor is unmistakable. Bouncing off houses, it is a fanfare. We are accelerating up a narrow street in the historic quarter of Dorset’s county town, and an adventure is beginning. My mate and neighbour Frank Warren is at the wheel. By calling he is a talented musician who runs an agency which brings music acts from all over the world to gigs, festivals and events in Britain, but today he is our captain, pilot of the good ship Lily – the pristine 1961 Minor convertible he has owned for a good 20 years now. His passengers on this voyage are myself and a visiting friend, fellow contributor to this very publication Andrew Everett. The sun is out and the hood is down. Dorset awaits us.…

The Rancho’s history dates back to the 1973 fuel crisis. At that time, the Simca-owned firm of Matra faced a reduced demand for their sports cars, but a Spanish dealer named Talleres Panade inspired a new product. This 1200 Campero was a Simca 1100-based leisure/utility vehicle aimed at customers who wanted Jeep style looks without a Jeep style price tag. Its most notable aspect was the fibreglass bodywork from a Madrid coach builder. Soon, Matra embarked on its own 2WD utility model, with a limited development budget. The floorpan was derived from the 1100 van, while the front wings, windscreen, doors and brakes were also sourced from existing Simcas. Antonis Volanis created a distinctive polyester/GRP rear section mounted on a steel frame. Skylights augmented the side windows, and there was…

Having tackled the ominous looking rust above the side window and into the roof, we then moved round to the back of our Montego and started on the tailgate. This had three distinct problem areas – some surface rust immediately below the rear screen that had clearly been painted over at some point, a more serious area of corrosion by one corner of the handle, and some accident damage lower down the panel. As things turned out, the first of these (and the most daunting because of its proximity to the screen and screen rubber, which we were not looking forward to removing and replacing,) turned out to be fairly minor. With the screen rubber lifted off the metal, Alan Denne got in with a sanding disc to clean the…

There is a long tradition in MG circles of the company introducing a new model to howls of complaint from traditionalists, only for those same traditionalists to come round eventually, recognise the new model’s merits and stop judging it in comparison with what went before. We'll see some more such models later in this feature for whom redemption has come arguably too late, but the Z-Type Magnette made the leap from 'not a proper MG' to a very desirable member of the family much more quickly because it was fundamentally such a good car. Why the initial scepticism? Well, development of a successor to the Y-Type had been underway for some time and designer Gerald Palmer had come up with an Italianate monocoque body with far more modern styling and…

Following on from the discussion on the previous spread about which Sprites to include in the Midget figures, you might be forgiven for thinking that we would have the same problem in this bout. If so, that would really rattle the Triumph camp because BMC’s ADO16 range of 1100 and 1300 cars (Austin, Morris, Wolseley, Riley and Vanden Plas as well as MG versions) was Britain’s best selling car every year from 1963 to 1971, with the sole exception of 1967. However, this is a very different situation to the Spridgets, because the MG1100 and MG1300 variants were not built at Abingdon, and MG’s engineers had no real input to the models. For those reasons, we feel justified in restricting ourselves to just the MG variants, which brings total sales…

'The MGC, eh? What a load of rubbish. Handles like a pig and drinks like a fish.' I wonder how many times owners have had to listen to bar-room pundits spouting nonsense like that. Not that the C was perfect, nothing ever is, but some cars seem to get a reputation early on that no amount of improvement and explanation can ever shift. (Yes, it will be the turn of the Triumph Stag to go under our microscope shortly!) The MGC’s troubles started early on. Since 1957, Abingdon had been building first the Austin-Healey 100-6, and later the Austin-Healey 3000. By that point though, the big Healey was coming to the end of its life as forthcoming US legislation would render it obsolete. MG had taken good care of the…

Here we are, the final round of this epic battle and things could not be more finely balanced with 15 points apiece. And while you have the advantage of being able to scan ahead and see the final results, at this point I really have no idea how this contest is going to end. It doesn't help that while these two contenders share many similarities, there are also major differences. As a newer model you'd expect the MG to score well in the survival stakes, but on the other hand their prices are only now starting to shift off rock bottom while the TR7s star has been in the ascendancy for a few years now. I suspect that it will all come down to production numbers in the end, and…

After what can best be described as an unsettled 12 months, Vauxhall’s famous Heritage Collection has now been put on display at the British Motor Museum in Gaydon, Warkwickshire. Last year, the imminent sale of Vauxhall’s former Luton site meant that the Collection was taken north to an interim home at the company’s Ellesmere Port factory, where a converted 8000 square-meter building had been set aside for the 60-strong collection that featured representatives from every decade of Vauxhall’s 117-year history. Plans were said to be in place to create an all-new publicfacing Heritage Centre at some point in the future, but now the 50 remaining cars and vans in the collection have made the journey back south to Gaydon. There, 30 of them (still covering each decade starting with the…

The drive down from Scotland to Lincolnshire was most enjoyable, but there had been an element of worry at the back of my mind. Partly that is inevitable as you get to know a new car which is some 45 years old and comes with an unknown history, but I was also a little concerned that I could not open the bonnet without the assistance of somebody pressing down on it while I pulled the release lever. This was a concern because I was travelling alone, the ignition charge warning light was constantly glowing (if only faintly) and I might have needed to employ the services of my battery power pack at some point. Besides, I had hoped to keep a wary eye on the fluid levels during a first…

We left the Panda last issue sitting on the drive late at night, covered in frost and awaiting a proper inspection in the morning. That inspection turned up a mixed bag, not bad enough to knock the project on its head, but not good enough either to fill us with joy. We had only paid £1400 for the car, so were fully expecting there to be plenty of jobs that needed to be done – and after all, it wouldn’t have been much of a project if it had been perfect! However, it came with an MoT that was barely three months old, so we could reasonably have expected it to be a fully functioning car. Unfortunately, to my mind it was totally unsafe to be on the road. Starting…

©Shutterstock.com/Tribalium88 Ibet that most of you can remember playing Top Trumps. In many ways it was an infuriating game, that old 1914 Fiat being utterly useless in every category except cubic capacity, where its primitive 14-litre motor would trounce every Ferrari, Jaguar or Aston Martin in the pack. But that was the beauty of the game’s design, selecting categories that gave every car a chance to shine and ensuring that nothing was ever totally unbeatable. In some ways, I feel we have done something similar when pitching 11 MGs against 11 Triumphs in this epic battle for superiority. We might only have included three categories on our score cards, but they have been rather delicately crafted! For starters, sales success has to be considered a major factor, but rather than…

And now at last we get to the first of the sports cars for which these two marques are so justly famed. This will potentially favour MG over Triumph, not least because sports cars tend not to sell in the same volumes as saloon cars and so Standard-Triumph’s greater manufacturing capacity will not be so decisive. I am getting ahead of myself though, because I am genuinely compiling this feature fight by fight and have no idea myself who will ultimately emerge victorious. The MGA was famously the car that MG wanted to put on sale in 1953, but Leonard Lord had just signed an agreement with Donald Healey to build the new Austin-Healey 100 sports car and didn't want the in-house competition. That’s why the essentially pre-war T-Type had…

Oh dear. You know how sometimes you look at two boxers stepping into the ring and they appear so poorly matched that your stomach turns over and you can't help thinking that one of them is going to get seriously hurt? This round makes me think of that. It’s like watching Frank Bruno square off against Mike Tyson, or when Wrexham, who had finished bottom of the entire football league the previous season, faced Arsenal who were the current League champions in the FA cup. (For the record, Bruno rocked Tyson with one mighty punch but was otherwise largely on the receiving end in a bout he lost, but Wrexham scored twice in the last ten minutes to emerge 2-1 victors.) I don't think this is over-stating the danger in…

Now here is an interesting comparison. At first sight, the MG RV8 (1992-1995) and the Triumph Stag (1970-1977) are hardly contemporaries, but bear with me because things are not quite as clear cut as they might appear. Starting as ever in the red corner, MG’s RV8 came about through an odd set of circumstances. Over half a million MGBs had been sold between 1962 and 1980, so there were still loads on the road when production drew to a close. Their bodies had all been produced for MG by Pressed Steel, who could see a continuing demand for replacement parts from all those existing owners, especially once the classic scene got going. As a result, they did not scrap the tooling, but instead sub-contracted it out for small runs of…

©Shutterstock.com/lukpedclub “If instead we'd pitched the Montego Turbo against the Dolomite Sprint, MG would have won this contest, not Triumph” So at the end of this epic duel, it is Triumph who emerge victorious by the slimmest of margins – 17 points to 16. Our congratulations to the champions from Canley and commiserations to the gallant losers from Abingdon. Commiserations also go to the MG Montego, which I really don't feel deserved a 3-0 thumping at the hands of Triumph’s Dolomite. However, there is an interesting twist here. If instead we had pitched the Montego Turbo against the Dolomite Sprint, then MG would have won this contest, not Triumph! That’s because it would have been worth £7300 today and would have beaten not only the Dolomite 1850 as quoted, but…

Call me old-fashioned, but I find cinema largely a waste of two expensive hours, one that has a bad effect on the eyes and ears. However, if you throw in a few interesting cars and bikes, then I’m game. Take The Graduate, for example. When the film was released in 1967 it was all a bit risqué and naughty, even if it doubled as a RomCom. But it also featured two redeeming qualities – a small Italian car, and a memorable sound track by Simon and Garfunkel. The film starred Dustin Hoffman, playing 21 year old Benjamin Braddock who had just graduated from college and returned rather aimlessly to his parents' house in Pasadena, California. This was something of a stretch as Hoffman was in reality about to turn 30.…

Charles Whilems: This car is a 1986 Polo C Formel E. The C is just the trim level, and the Formel E refers to the fact that it was a high compression engine with a stop/start system (I believe it was the first such system). They also came with a change-up and fuel economy meter on the dash, but for some reason this car never had any of those – and I know they were never fitted because my father bought it brand new. It turned out to be the last car that my dad had. I was around 20 years old when he bought it, and I inherited it in 2010 when he died. The Polo was 24 years old at that point and was well used, including having…

In the red corner for MG in round one is the Y-Type, a great all-rounder. Powered by a single-carburettor XPAG engine of 1250cc, it could amble from 0-60mph in around 30 seconds. Actually, referring to it as an amble is rather unfair, because the 1940s were a different time and at launch in 1947, the Y-Type was just about the most powerful car in its class with a maximum of 46bhp delivered at 4800rpm. The brand new Austin A40 Devon with its 1200cc engine, for example, had just 40bhp and recorded a time of 37.2 seconds for the same sprint. And remember, we are talking family saloon cars here anyway, not sports cars. Essentially the same XPAG engine as found in the Y-Type was tuned to 54.4bhp in the MG…

Sticking with the sports car theme but moving down to the lightweight division, we've got two perennial favourites of the classic car scene – MG’s Midget and Triumph’s Spitfire. Now, before we get into the cars themselves, I do need to explain a little about what is and what isn't included under the MG banner. That’s because from 1961, MG Midgets and Austin-Healey Sprites were produced alongside each other on the Abingdon lines, with little other than badges and a few bits of trim to distinguish one from the other. After the licencing agreement with Healey was cancelled in January 1971, there were also 1022 cars badged simply as Austin Sprites, after which production carried on under the MG banner alone. Therefore, I don't think that too many people will…

Rarely do competing cars from different manufacturers fall into closely defined brackets as neatly as we would like. With the possible exception of the Midget and Spitfire, all of the cars we have compared so far have overlapping characteristics, but also their own distinct identities. These two, the MGB and the TR4, are closer than most, especially if we restrict ourselves to the 1960s – both have four-cylinder engines, capacities of 1798cc in the one and either 1991cc or 2138cc in the other, both with overdrive options, both two-seat roadsters… the list goes on. There is very little to separate them on paper either. Taking 1962 as an example, the MGB is just 6cm longer and 6cm wider than the TR4 (funny, but I would have guessed it was the…

The end is now in sight as we enter this, the 10th round of our 11-round extravaganza, and still neither side has been able to land a knock-out punch. This round sees the MG Montego and MG Turbo pitched against the Triumph Dolomite 1850 and Sprint. These two were never direct competitors in the market place, the Triumph being current from 1972 to 1980 and the MG not appearing until 1984 and lasting until 1991, but we think there are enough similarities between the two to justify the comparison. Sticking to the format and starting with the MG Montego even though it is the later car, at risk of sounding like a broken record this was yet another new model that was greeted at its launch with cries of despair…