This year, the family-owned Morgan car company celebrates a century of building sports cars seemingly with a hair-shirt public school belief that you had to be uncomfortable to be enjoying yourself
The latest Morgan Aero 8 is a supreme example of keeping the charisma of the marque, with the traditional long louvred bonnet, while incorporating 21st century technology under the skin and new-century cockpit comfort. Power from the 274kW (367bhp) 4.8-litre BMW V8 keeps the Morgan well ahead of the traffic with a catalogue top speed of 274kph (170mph).
New Plymouth enthusiast Bryce Barnett is a Morgan connoisseur from way back, and I am indebted to him for letting Gavin Bain from Fazazz, the amazing motorist’s shop in Christchurch and New Zealand Morgan agent, chauffeur me around Godley Heights for photographer Terry Marshall to capture the style of the new Morgan for this marque memoir.
Morganeering in the ’60s
It brought back the excitement of being at the little Morgan factory in the shadow of the Malvern hills near Wales one August day in 1968 when Morgan announced its first V8 sports car. It was using the 3.5-litre aluminium V8 from the Rover, which in turn had borrowed it from the F85 Oldsmobile of the ’50s.
Bruce McLaren and Jack Brabham had been there earlier in the ’60s when McLaren used an enlarged Traco-tuned version of the alloy engine in his first CanAm sports cars, and then Brabham rescued the concept for Repco to use as the basis for its V8 that would win World Championships for the team in 1966 and 1967.
The words I wrote for the Australian magazine, Sports Car World, 40 years ago still apply to the spirit of the Morgan and its followers around the world. “The Morgan Plus 8 is probably the newest old car in the world. It’s been said that if you like the idea of vintage motoring but don’t like vintage fragility, you should buy a Morgan. Over the years they haven’t changed a great deal – they just get faster.”
A Century of Motoring
In his splendid three-volume encyclopaedia published for Lord Montagu of Beaulieu in 2000, editor Nick Georgano writes that vicar’s son, Harold Frederick Stanley Morgan, started in 1908 to build a single-seater three-wheeler. “It was powered by a V-twin Peugeot engine, transmission being by dog clutches and two chain drives of various ratios. Its most remarkable feature was the independent front suspension by coil springs and sliding pillars, the basic principle of which is still used in Morgan cars today.”
The new Aero 8 has Formula One-type front suspension with a bonded and riveted aluminium monocoque chassis, but the other models in the range still use the historic suspension medium.
In 1910 Morgan formed the Morgan Motor Car Co Ltd, and in November of that year he exhibited two versions of his prototype single-seater at the Moor Cycle Show, powered by 961cc JAP V-Twin engines. A year later he was building two-seaters. In 1912 a Morgan covered 58.96 miles (94.87km) in an hour at Brooklands, setting a new cycle-car record. The first major success came in 1913 when WG McMinnies won the Cyclecar Grand Prix at Amiens, though he was subsequently disqualified as the Morgan three-wheeler was deemed to be a sidecar! Morgan immediately began to offer Grand Prix production models. At the outbreak of WWI in 1914 annual production was nearly 1000 cars! The first Morgan Aero appeared in 1921 with a Blackburne engine and the latest BMW-engined model recalls marque history.
You could only have three wheels on your Morgan until the company got radical as late as November 1935, and produced a new model with four wheels and four cylinders with a Coventry Climax 1122cc motor to compete with the MG.
Those sports cars were famous for their woodwork. In my 1968 feature I wrote – “A walk around the workshops takes you back. The body frames are built up by joiners and carpenters working in an air of sawdust and shavings. You could be in a furniture factory. But you get that personal pride-in-their-work feeling. If you bought a Morgan you wouldn’t just be a customer – you’d almost be a friend of the family. Maybe that’s not the way they work, but that’s the feeling you get.”
You weren’t just buying a sports car when you bought a Morgan, it was a way of a chap recapturing the memory of his good old days when sporty meant Spartan. The hood might as well have been offered as an option, because you rarely saw one driven with the top up, even in foul weather.
Bending Tradition
When Morgan bent its tradition and introduced what Georgano refers to as ‘a curious coupé’ in 1964, the customers voted with their wallets and only 26 coupés were built before the model was withdrawn three years later.
The new Aero Morgan BMWs are built in a modern factory facility behind the original works at Malvern. In four-cylinder days there could be a customer waiting list of four years and production of the two-seater sports cars was strictly scheduled to on a Monday-to-Friday basis – unless there was a four-seater on special order – and it was said that the ladies who sewed the leather upholstery worked on the Saturday morning to complete the extra seating!
The production Morgans from the original factory still use the original sliding pillar front suspension.
“It’s not a company gimmick,” Peter Morgan, grandson of the founder, told me as he strode along the rows of waiting chassis/body units in his tweedy houndstooth suit in 1968. “The front suspension works so well, we don’t see why we should change it.” Morgan said that Morgan customers generally knew the shortcomings of the car before they bought it – and, indeed, that these draughty vintage shortcomings were usually the reasons why they bought a Morgan in the first place!
Original and Modern
Bryce Barnett’s new Aero 8 is an amazing combination of original and modern. The BMW V8 provides lusty lazy urge and the six-speed ’box is offered with a sporty optional ZF automatic that has ‘blip’ technology – the transmission is programmed to blip the throttle during downshifts! The space age aluminium build processes has kept weight down to 1175kg for quoted performance of 0-100kph at 4.5 seconds, a top speed of 273kph and town/ country combined fuel thirst of 11.2 l/100km (25.2mpg).
The big square doors and the spoilered tail jar the eye of the traditional Morganiste, brought up on cutaway leather-trimmed doors and Perspex side screens that would soon become opaque, adding to the vintage air. The big doors are a concession to electric windows and modern side-impact safety. The boot lid is evidence that there is a sizeable luggage boot beneath it, something that earlier Morgan owners had to do without.
The louvred bonnet (the louvres are an optional extra according to Bain) on this modern Moggy barely covers the muscles of the BMW V8. Sitting deep in the cosy cockpit I notice the engine-turned alloy dash and the three windscreen wipers on the shallow screen. It was chilly out on Godley Heights overlooking the ocean, but the blast furnace heater coped easily.
Bracing Stuff
Forty years ago I noted that the first V8 Morgan had used weighed almost the same as the Triumph TR engine it was replacing, an untuned 137kW (184bhp), but giving an extra 56kW (75bhp) over the TR. I was impressed at the performance then: “Acceleration is bracing stuff. Woofle the V8 a bit, drop the clutch and you’re steaming down the road with a soprano shrilling from the rear tyres and twin tracks of rubber being left on the road. Peter Morgan talks of the possibility of getting a five-speed ’box but I don’t see the need for five cogs.”
The new Aero 8 has six speeds, but the torque of the big BMW is such that you don’t really need them all, and Bain says many new customers are requesting the automatic option – “Now that people don’t regard auto as wimpish any longer!”
Back in 1968 I was awed at the cost of the Plus 8 at more than double that of the TR version.
“You could tell yourself that it might be shaking the fillings out of your teeth and freezing your girlfriend half to death, but at least it’s cheap. The Plus 8 isn’t!”
The new Aero 8 is around $170,000 depending on the options ordered, but Morgan aficionados still queue for the privilege of ownership. Fazazz has a limited number of centenary year cars available for delivery in 2009.
Forty years ago it was the same. “Peter Morgan probably doesn’t mind about the price of the Plus 8. He’ll sit back in his ’30s-style dusty office with its varnished panel walls, piles of magazines and photographs of Morgans pinned all round, and keep on filling the order books half a year ahead. You get the impression he doesn’t want customers who are liable to make a fuss if their order is late, or if the car is too Spartan. Peter Morgan is doing the man a favour by selling him a car – with every other motor company in the world it’s the other way round, but it seems to be the right way to buy a Morgan…”
I don’t suppose much has changed.
Words: Eoin Young Photos: Terry Marshall
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