Junkyard Find: 1976 MG MGB
In all of my decades of visiting junkyards, one thing has remained constant: I’ll see a handful of Fiat 124 Sport Spider s and MG MGB s every year, about the same number in 2018 as I saw each year in 2001 or 1987. Here’s the latest: a red ’76 convertible in a self-service wrecking yard in California’s Central Valley.
The reason for this is easy to guess: both the 124 Sport Spider and MGB have been cheap, fun sports cars that are just too cool to discard, so they end up as long-postponed projects in driveways and yards. The decades go by, and then one day the tow truck shows up for the car’s final ride. This car has a couple of parking stickers from 1987 and the kind of nuked interior that suggests long-term outdoor storage.
1976 wasn’t a great year for the MGB; American headlight-height and crash-bumper requirements took effect in 1974, forcing the “black bumper” cars to sit at an ungainly height while sticking their ugly plastic snouts at the world. Engine power, never very high, came to just 62.5 horsepower in 1976, and the fact that British Leyland claimed that half-horse tells a very depressing story.
BL build quality wasn’t so great in the mid-1970s, as unions, managers, and the British government squabbled. Still, these cars were fun to drive, and (as someone who daily-drove an MGB for years) it makes me a little sad to see one getting thrown out like an ordinary Kia Sephia. Though who knows, someday we may weep for those Sephias as well.
These wheels didn’t do the look of this B any favors.
The sports car America loved first. Wait, wasn’t that the MGA?
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
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A friend of mine had a MGB GT hard top in red around 71 or 72. It was his next car after a '69 GTO (a Judge that was special ordered in red with black vinyl top). Enjoyed riding along with him in the MG. Drove from central Iowa to Iowa City for a Byrds concert the winter of 72/73 in it. My only negative rememberance was, at times, I wished I could shift my legs more than the space allowed. Fun car!
I still miss my '77 MGB. The cheap Brits really missed the call when they didn't go to a 5-speed gearbox (yes, I know about the rare OD boxes), a reasonable fuel injection system and/or the Rover V-8.