Anthropologists need to compare the love that people have for these, um… difficult cars with the love some people have for difficult members of the opposite sex. I love cars like Mr. McAleer’s father’s old MGB, as long as I don’t have to take care of them. I’d much rather own a Miata.

“Aha!” cried Dad with barely-disguised glee, “The carburetors must need adjustment.”

This made me laugh, great stuff.

As a “deal” I purchased a 1969 GT for $650.00. On the drive home it change lanes on the gas. Those leaf springs were almost falling out. After discovering the smoke was caused by a large hole in the number 3 piston, I set about rebuilding the engine with my good friend John. Added an overdrive box, chrome wires, and nice leather interior. Several times I had to coax the fuel pump back to life with the knock-off hammer. The worst was when the “rebuilt” distributor I installed gave up. There was so much play it was breaking the tip off the rotor.

I sold that car to purchase a 1985 XJ6 and regretted it ever since.

Today I am happy to say that I am British free automotively, well except for the fact that I make my living selling British spares…

Though I’ve never owned or experienced a MGB, reading your article makes me feel like I did. I’ve long had maniacal dreams of getting a project car and devoting untold money and time fixing it up, making it mine, but my wife firmly squashes such fantastic notions. Though she is beginning to come around now which is promising.

It’s been a long time since I’ve read an article here at TTAC that’s positive and pleasurable to enjoy as a petrolhead. It`s that rare glimpse into the souls of us enthusiasts everywhere. Enough of the doom and gloom articles, even if it is the truth. Actually I remember a series RF did on Jalopnik some time ago where he wrote about classic cars you must drive/experience in your life. Wonderful series. If you have time RF, bring it back.

Again, thanks for the great read Brendan!

Which is not the same as saying I never had to make a roadside repair. All such interruptions to my transit were brief, however, and successfully overcome. Trouble in transit wasn’t for me the vexing curse of British motoring that I was led to expect. My particular recurring penance was the uncanny failure of pinion and stub axle seals in deepest sub-zero winter, when no amount of insulation between me and the concrete floor of an unheated garage — when I had a garage at all — slowed thermal drainage of my body’s caloric content into the planet and arctic atmosphere around me.

You could either deride the construction techniques evident in these cars as quaint and crude, or admire them as craft. Door hinges crafted from bits of steel tubing hand-welded to a flange suggested something less than the repeatability of, say, Ford’s River Rouge plant.

In the mid-1970s, British Leyland adopted electronic ignition in a bid to improve emissions and reliability. In the Triumph Spitfire, the system’s designers chose to mount the transistor pack directly on the distributor. This gave the car the entertaining trait of spontaneous engine shut-down at speed. Engine heat migrated directly into the transistor ignition module, with erratic loss of spark resulting. It might happen at 70mph in the left lane of the Massachusetts Turnpike or at 0mph idling on Boston’s Tobin Bridge at rush hour. Or you might find yourself involuntarily drifting down an off-ramp on a moonless night into the cracked-glass crumble that was Newark circa 1980. Fortunately, all you had to do was wait 10 minutes for the ignition module to cool, and the trusty iron-block mill fired right up. You’d be on your way, sometimes literally just in the nick of time. You just couldn’t be sure for how long.

BL made good on that miscalculation, however, with warranty replacement of the ignition modules with revised epoxied packs mounted to the firewall.

By 1984, parts availability was no longer instant and responsibilities argued for a little more practicality. That year, I completed a migration to the anvil reliability of American cars begun in 1982, with which I’ve been trouble-free ever since.

Insofar as my Trumphs and MGs unfailingly carried me to my intended destination on the same day as planned, I regarded them as reliable, which couldn’t be said for the allegedly sexier Fiats some of my friends and siblings chose. Early in British Leyland ownership I discovered the key to Anglo-motive reliability. After an early series of recurring fuel pump and generator failures, I simply packed spares behind the seats. Those parts never failed again. Clockwork routine maintenance and good tires took care of the rest. I still miss those cars, and it’s fair to say that despite having had vastly more power in many cars since, none have been more fun.

Phil

I also have an E-Type and sundry other British detritus, too. I enjoy the hell out of it and there are far many more days driving something like a new Audi or Lexus where I would wish for an MGB than the other way around.

Great line! I really enjoyed reading this article!

Every other day I walk outside, get into my plane Jane A4 Avant and embark on my morning commute. The car performs this task every day just as it has for years without fuss or any indication that the car would rather sit this one out. Before I got into re-purposing my A4 sedan, I really never had an appreciation of just how nice it is to have a car that starts every time and gets me to my desired destination in safety without any undue or desired excitement rooted in a jeopardized arrival. I believe that today most people have little if any time invested in their car, and they have no reservations about that. Today a simple reading of the owner’s manual is asking a lot of people. Ignorance is bliss… it really is. I don’t know when to say when and as a result… well keep reading.

By direct contrast I have my former daily driver turned toy/track car A4 quattro 2.0 20v turbo sedan. I can’t particularly blame the car for not being a team player all the time as I’ve given it an OBD II lobotomy and grafted into place more mechanical muscle than the quattro gmbh folks saw fit to grant the RS4 but without 500lbs of extra weight to lug around. Upgraded brake, suspension… that stuff too. It goes, it turns, it stops but it also took a huge investment of time and money to get the car close to where I wanted it to be. This too is an ongoing project with no foreseeable conclusion, simply elevated goals with ever more impractical solutions.

While the MG may require periodic adjustments to the carburettors in order to stay in shape. The homebrew tinkerer of today has newer more high-tech toys. So many toys that it makes one appreciate the simplicity of a car like the MG, even if it doesn’t accelerate like like a tree frog leaps. I can coax more than 200hp per liter from my engine, but it doesn’t come easy.

Today’s tinker drops some considerable coin on electronic toys tat are a way more involved than a trusty old carb. I run stand alone engine management which is my way of pretending like I have any sort of clue how to tune an engine. Thousands of dollars spent on the ability to control the engine. While one could street tune a car… any real fine tuning requires a four wheel drive dyno and the associated $125-200/hr fees just to rent the rollers add in 60-100/hr for a tuner.

While the MG may be tuned by ear and nose I have data logging capabilities which generate huge sums of information which requires processing and analysis to derive any sort of meaningful conclusion. With more sensors, gauges and costs than an MG I attentively must monitor my wide band air/fuel ratios, turbo boost pressure and oil pressure. I’ve not even added the on board chassis data acquisition capabilities which will record output from accelerometers, brake light switch, throttle position etc. All so I can analyze and improve my driving on the track.

All of that so I can park my sedan >90% of the time and drive it a few days a year on private road course pavement. I also got tired of the automatic gearbox in my A4 Avant. I’ll be swapping that and all of the associated parts out for a manual gearbox and associated parts within a months time. I prefer to build the car I want rather than buying a car I like just enough to own. I suppose this means I’d be likely to buy an old car like an Alfa Romeo or an MG rather than buying a miata… Yikes is there a pharmaceutical company working on a pill for this yet?

Mine was a 1968 MGB-GT bought in 1976 for $700. I knew nothing of how to fix a car, but I was willing to learn and the MGB was more than willing to teach. One day I was cruising down the road going around 50 mph, when I saw a tire bouncing down the road next to me, I realized that it was mine when the grinding noise of the brake rotors hiting the pavement awoke me from the trance like state I was in, watching the bouncing wheel and wondering who was throwing tires down the street. Replacing the wheel knock off hub spline and a complete brake job was my education in twisting the wrenches that time.

I appreciated the Morris Garage engineering genius when I found out that the breather hole for the diaphragm fuel pump was in the topmost part of the housing so that no moisture could escape. This rendered the pump useless, freezing the diaphragm in very cold weather. Of course this had to happen 5 miles from the nearest house on a country road at 2:00am when it was -5 degrees.

I sold my rust bucket GT in 1979 for $400 and bought a soulless but reliable RX-7. To this day I miss the MG, but not the Mazda.

John

Admittedly they lost the plot badly in the 70’s which is probably where most of their bad rep comes from.

Very well done!

My father bought a new MG B in 67 or so… I still remember the day he brought it home, despite being only 4 at the time.

Like the author, I learned all my colorful language as I ‘assisted” him in a restoration of a 1950 MG TD when I was a lad of 9 or so.

His retirement project was the pinnacle of British Roadsterdom: a Series 1 E-type Jaguar, which as a family heirloom passed into my care in 2003. I am doing my best to pass on the “car guy” gene to my two sons through this car of their grandfather’s. There is no more demanding yet rewarding car ownership experience as a classic British sports car. It tests you and rewards you in equal measure. It is not so outrageously expensive as say, an Italian mistress from Maranello, but it sure beats every cheap bit of frumpery from Detroit.

–chuck
http://chuck.goolsbee.org

great story. excellent writing. very enjoyable read. please submit more.

They couldn’t figure out how to make it drip oil.

– I’m a Long-time-ago TR-4 owner.