Nory P wrote:
>
> Is Morgan the only -real- British car left?
But which Morgan do you mean -- the Morgan with the Buick engine, or the
Morgan with the Fiat engine? :-)
(Explanation: the Morgan +8 uses the Buick-derived 3.5L aluminium V8.
At one point several years ago, the Morgan +4 used, of all things, the
2L Fiat Twin Cam engine as used in the 124 series. I believe they've
gone to a newer Rover design for the +4, but...)
Morgan, of course, have *never* built their own engines -- kind of like
M.G.s and Healeys, come to think of it... Remember, even the XPEG was
descended from the XPAG which was a replacement for the SOHC engine used
in the prewar J-series Midgets (which in turn was developed from a WWI
aircraft engine). And the XPAG was a modified Wolseley unit.
The most popular Morgans, at least in the States, were those which
included the Triumph TR engine. In its 2138cc guise as used in the
TR4A, this is a lusty powerplant, torquey and strong, as befits its, er,
agricultural upbringing (the TR's original design was based on the
Ferguson tractor engine). Other popular Morgan powerplants included
various English Ford units, of whatever displacement and configuration
they could wrangle from Dagenham. In the Fifties, there were Morgans
built using Ford 105E *side-valve* engines from the Anglia,
fercrissakes.
Even Lotus used off-the-rack engines in their greatest competition and
road cars for years; some were that same 105E side-valve, some were BMC
A-series units, some were modified fire pumps (the Coventry Climax
FWA). They didn't build their own powerplants till the 907 motor in the
early 1970s, constructed to go into the Esprit and co-opted by Kjell
Qvale for the Jensen-Healey. 20+ years of development and debugging
later, these can be very neat motors -- four valves, two cams, lots of
power. But that's the entry level for British sports cars with in-house
designed, proprietary engines. Above that you have Jaguar and Aston
Martin, who did design their own engines before quality became job, uh,
what was that number again?
Remember, our beloved Spridgets were conceived with the phrase, "What I
want is a bug... [something] a chap could keep in his bike shed." There
wasn't room in the manufacturing budget to spend the 1 pound sterling
that DMH figured it would have cost to make the lights go up and down on
a stick, there *certainly* wasn't enough to develop a new engine from
scratch. The fact that John Cooper had been tweaking BMC's A Series
engine for some of his Formula Junior cars (remember, the Sprite was
designed in 1956-57, two years before the Mini was first sold) made a
happy coincidence, but Len Lord was always a tightfisted son of a sea
cook (M.G. historians will forever curse him for his comment, "Well,
*that* bloody lot can go for a start," directed at the Abingdon
competitions department when he took over Nuffield, er, Morris in 1935.)
So we who love these cars from the shallow end of the cost pond have to
take what we can get, where we get it, wherever it came from.
Fortunately, the brilliant chassis designers made these cars *so* much
fun to drive that it almost doesn't matter what's under the hood; what's
in the driver's seat is going to have a blast.
--Scott Fisher
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