The Lost MG

The MG that should have been

By John Sprinzel

Just over 30 years ago, British car enthusiasts banded together in an attempt to save the MG factory from closure. This group was combating a bunch of bean counters and amateur motor manufacturers who comprised most of the board of “management” of British Leyland.

One of the keenest of the fighters was Sid Beer, a long time MG dealer who included a treasure trove of MGs in the MG Museum at his premises in the village of Houghton in the east of England. I drove up there one sunny autumn day to enjoy a viewing of a truly remarkable assembly of almost every model Abingdon had ever assembled. My main target was EX 234, one of Syd Enever’s design team possibilities for a replacement sports car. While I was admiring the sleek lines of the prototype, an MGB GT drove up carrying the famous numberplate MG 1. Occupying the driver’s seat was John Thornley, the former long-time boss of the Abingdon factory. So in addition to the opportunity of driving this rare MG, I also had my old boss at hand, for I had been fortunate enough to drive for the factory competition’s department during the glorious heyday of MG in the 1950s.

The EX 234 project came into being because John realized that, after the introduction of the MGB, he would have a very hard time persuading the money men at BMC to ever lay out the huge expense of tooling up another sheet steel sports car. In the search for a less expensive solution, he investigated the possibility of some form of plastic body joined together with a production tub. Alongside John’s research, Syd Enever’s team was hand-building a suitable platform and running gear to form the basis of the new car. They used the Midget’s 1275 motor and an Austin Champ Jeep rear axle, which was the best of the BMC units suitable to use with independent suspension. Current Hydrolastic units were fitted all round, and the entire chassis was sent off to Italy for what was labeled on the drawings as the Farina Line.

John Thornley was not too sure that this was actually the design studio which built the prototype, but the cost turned out a little over forty thousand pounds sterling (around $70,000) at the time. The resulting sports car was more or less ignored, and no further tests or discussions seem to have been held concerning its future. Alongside Abingdon’s prototype, a Mini-based sports version was also being worked on, but reports say that Alec Issigonis, BMCs brilliant but rather eccentric design director, was totally uninterested in this car. It too lay in some odd corner to gather dust. I recall that when we competition drivers complained that Sprite and Mini non-synchro bottom gears were causing no end of problems, his reported reply was that no one really used bottom gear except to start, and that synchro would be a total waste of money.

In 1972, some five years after Abingdon’s EX 234 was built, Leyland’s bosses had a full committee report to them on suggestions for the future of the sports cars built by the Group. This committee strongly favored the MG marque, with a good demand still for the product and a very famous name throughout the world. As is often the way with bean counters, this report was totally ignored, as was a similar study five years later. The Leyland directors strangely chose the Triumph TR7, hardly the most successful sports car in Britain’s history, over the obvious superiority of MG, which was outselling the Triumph in a ratio of around 10-1. This in spite of the B’s 20-year-old design, an even older engine, and a heap of U.S. regulation-inspired add-on stuff. It doesn’t need a genius to estimate the sales of a production version of EX 234, not only with the Midget engine, but also with the option of a bigger and more powerful O-series engine already in design form.

So what was this prototype like to drive? In 1977, the car had been sold to Sid Beer for his museum, with only 100 miles on the speedometer. Clearly, with this sort of mileage, no one at Leyland had had anything to do with it, no testing had been done, and certainly the Board of Directors had not considered production in any form. With Sid sitting alongside me, and with the knowledge that Enever’s team had set the car up with only their best guess as to how it should be built, this run was not ideal for any flat-out testing.

First gear, as always at the time, was without synchro, but once we were up through the gearbox, only the minimal transmission buzz could be heard. There was obviously little sound deadening fitted, and with a little axle rumble tuned in, this car really did sound like a Midget. Top speed was hampered by rather a low gear, though this did help with splendid acceleration, making me look for a fifth gear at the top of each burst of speed. The Hydrolastic suspension kept the car beautifully flat and smooth through the corners, with none of the usual lurch over uneven bits of the surface. There was also no rear-end steer, and I felt that even without any development input that the handling was far superior to the current Spridget.

The interior was vast, and for my six foot three inches of height, there was space for legs, knees, arms, and elbows. The small steering wheel was set amongst excellent instrumentation, and occupants were surrounded by interior trim far better than has been normal on Abingdon products, with comfortable seats and two compact extra back seats with better legroom than in the MGB GT. There was excellent visibility and really good braking, although I see that I found the handbrake to be weak (not unusual in early four disc braked systems). I also criticized the heel and toe arrangement, but again, this is something that would obviously have been fully sorted even with a minimum of development testing.

All in all, I concluded my little road test by thinking this would have been a delightful successor to both the B and Midgets, with good looks, great performance, and probably the continued money-making record of many years of Abingdon sports cars. Strangely enough, I had now driven a potential winner that Leyland boss Michael Edwardes had not sat in—or for that matter, even seen.