> I can't tell you how often the TD and I had a conversation that
> went like this:
> ME: OOPS! I got us into this, can you get us out?
> TD: OK
> And it did.
You've just described what Safety Fast means. Always more than a
slogan, it defined the reason the cars are so much fun to drive
fast: no matter how stupid a move you make (up to the limits of
reason and probably somewhat beyond), the car will do whatever
you ask of it -- or more specifically, what you expect of it, which
might be different from the actual inputs you give it -- to get you
out of a scrape. This was the overriding engineering concern of
Syd Enever and John Thornley, to provide a car (within the limits
of whatever soul-deadening hand controlled the purse strings from
decade to decate) that always did what you wanted it to do under
any circumstances, always fun but always safe as well.
My most recent such experience was when Jeff Zurschmeide was driving
The Green Car with me in the right seat (that's the passenger seat for
Our Friends Across Either Pond). He was enjoying the new motor quite
a bit, and had come across a blind hill carrying a nice amount of speed
only to find that as you crested the hill, the gentle corner turned
into a decreasing-radius left-hander that was reverse-cambered, with a
nice sharp drop-off to the right (my side). Now, Jeff has more time
in a race car than I do, so he immediately did The Right Thing, and I
knew what he was doing, so I wasn't nervous (well, not intellectually
nervous, anyway :-). In this case, the right thing consisted of staying
ON the gas (we were under the limits of the tires) so that the rear
end didn't break loose as it got light cresting the hill, but to slow
down he started feeding in additional steering lock a couple inches at
a time, back and forth, in little nibbling motions. Each time he
turned the wheel to the left, the car would understeer and scrub off
a little speed; he'd straighten the wheel, then nibble back to get the
overall rate down where it was safe to go around the turn. If he'd
held the lock and kept scrubbing, we would have plowed off course;
if he'd lifted off the throttle or worse, braked, the rear would have
come loose. Instead, the oscillating between understeer and correct-
steer meant that the car continued on its path, but slowed down without
unweighting the rear tires. Neat stuff, and a perfect example of what
Safety Fast means.
"What makes M.G.s such great cars," Jeff said on the drive home, "is
that I can get in, never having driven this one before, and just trust
that it will do what I want it to do when I do it without thinking
about it."
> Get'em running and use them. Well, save one for posterity and run the living
> daylights out of the other.
"Drive your cars as they were meant to be driven, for they will
outlive us all." -- A quote from a late M.G. historian, used as
his epitaph in a magazine article eulogizing him some years back.
--Scott "Or you could give one of 'em to me" Fisher
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