Jerry
30-Apr-2008, 07:40 PM
Steve Wilson loses out on the pull, but is impressed by an MG underdog
Article from Classic Car Mart
I am currently a man of constant (automotive) sorrow; I and my family too. My wife’s 14-year-old 4x4 horsebox-tug, fresh from a £400 bill for brake renewal, decided to lose the use of its clutch. She opted to have it fixed by a local work-at-your-home mechanic, whose van flank bears the slogan: ‘An Eagle in a Field of Turkeys.’ Well, the eagle has flown for the last several days, leaving the 4x4 reared up in our drive on a pair of red-and-white axle stands, with its entire transmission housing lying among nuts, bolts and rusting clutch plates on the wet gravel beneath. I’m looking out at it now.
Rubber Bumper-less
No problem, we thought. Our MGB, 456, would fill the breach while the wife was using my car. Despite the odd rough edge, and living out in the winter weather, 456 has always been dead reliable. So a few days ago, I went off in the MG to do the weekly shop. About two miles out, it stalled at a junction on a downslope – I’d put the choke in too soon, I thought. Re-started, and was greeted by a fearful noise. But the clutch, unwisely not replaced when the reconditioned engine had been fitted, did that sometimes; and by the time we got to Sainsburys, things had quietened down.Shopping done, I got in and turned the key. Nothing. Feared the cold weather had taken its toll on the battery, the same Halfords one the car had come with four years ago, I had a look under the back seat where it lives. No loose connections, so I called the RAC. A commendable 40 minutes later, up rolled the orange van. A young-ish patrol soon discounted the battery theory, had the front end up on a trolley jack, whacked the starter motor a few times, and declared it defunct.
He said he couldn’t tow me to my guys at Abingdon Car Restorations (ACR), as the towing eye on these models is only on the bumper, not screwed into the chassis. A push start got nowhere, other than nearly giving a friendly, elderly Sainsburys trolley guy a heart attack. RAC man then asked if I would risk a tow-start. Yes I would, so we tried it, in second, gathered speed, let the clutch out, engine caught, then died. Running out of car park, he tows me round the corner but is too eager to catch a gap in traffic and pulls away too fast. I watch helplessly as the loose tow-strap snaps taut, and bang! Suddenly I’m going nowhere and all he’s towing is the front bumper…
RAC man never quibbles over whose fault it was, so he and a burly site worker soon push the MG into life and we proceeded in convoy, me revving hard at junctions, to Steve and Ray at ACR. Much mirth, no problem. If we’d put the tow-strap round behind the front wishbones, they said, we’d have been OK. The RAC to their credit authorised payment for the job in two working days. We now wear a fresh, welded-on bumper and a recently rebuilt starter motor. But meanwhile, driving the grown-up car down a narrow wet lane, approaching a giant puddle, I expected the car coming the other way to let me through first, as I was closer, and it was a police car… but on he came, and our off-side mirrors clipped and shattered. Perfectly amiable, knock-for-knock – but it’s left me wondering which of the emergency services I’ll be having the next go-round with!
Underdog MG
Over recent months, I’d been lucky enough to have tried two out of three of the ‘modern’ MG Rover Z-Series cars; a nice MG ZT-T, and a perky MG ZR. Time to make up the set, and ACR just happened to know the owner of a clean, late example locally.
I knew him too, as it turned out. Richard Day had been the owner of the RV8-styled GT which I’d briefly contemplated purchasing, only to see it go for £4000 to a new home in Dusseldorf. What is it with the German connection? My Minor-driving pal Axel now also has one for his wife and another for his son, in addition to a 1948 M-Series Morris 10 and a Vanden Plas 1100. And his friend Manfred has just found a better ZA Magnette than the ones I’ve tested recently. We may have won the war, but we’re losing the heritage!
Richard Day works as an engineer at the Rutherford laboratory in Harwell and got into MGs aged around 40 when a colleague turned up in a modern TF. After various ‘Bs’, he bought his first, Trophy Blue ZS 120+, brand new. ‘We got it early in 2002, just after they came out, for around £12,000, from our local MG Rover dealer, Kernahans of Witney, where the owner Martin Kernahan had a ZR which he ran as a rally car. Everybody got a company finance deal via the XPower website that was so good you couldn’t refuse it.
‘The blue one was the first new car I ever bought,’ grinned Richard, a large, genial guy. ‘Up to then I’d always bought motors with 100,000 miles on them. We did 36,000 miles in the first car with no problems, and we liked it, so when we were looking for a replacement for our high mileage Vauxhall Carlton, we traded in the old ZS and got this one, also new. It’s another 120+, only by 2005 they’d taken the ‘+’ off – it had mainly meant electric windows and air-con. Yes, 2005 – we bought it about six weeks before the company went belly-up…’
Many would raise an eyebrow at Richard’s choice, and not just because of the timing. The ZR had been acknowledged as a fun, cheeky little hatchback, and the ZT as a fast, handsome package with sophisticated suspension. But the ZS? Like the others, it had derived directly from the Rover range, in this case from the Rover 45, essentially a warmed-over 400 that itself had derived from the mid-Nineties’ Honda Civic – nothing wrong with that, just that it was relatively dated. It was felt to be an old man’s car, and sat uneasily between the small family and medium-sized sectors, with limited room in the back seat. On the one hand it was dearer than a Ford Focus, on the other it lacked the size/capacity of a Mondeo or Passat. Imperious Car magazine dismissed the 45 as ‘Britain’s second worst car,’ (no, I don’t know what they thought the worst one was). When it came to the ZS, What Car? in 2002 considered its looks ‘boy-racer’, and Car, while acknowledging the ZS’ ‘great handling’ and ‘fun performance’, summed it up witheringly as ‘a re-polished turd’.
Zed Head
Harsh, as my daughter would say, and when Richard’s late, XPower Grey model rolled into our drive, I could immediately write off the ‘boy racer’ bit – this was a well-styled car with real presence. The model’s 2004 face-lift, though the loss of twin headlamps was lamented, had been effective for the ZSs. It had incorporated elements from the MG SV, with the front splitter extended into the pronounced wheelarch and side-skirt extensions, as well as a ZT-style, better integrated grille and headlamp revision. The ZS also got a new tailgate and boot, and a new rear bumper and spoiler. It added up, in my book, to discreetly aggressive looks.
‘The way the front end looks,’ Richard laughed, ‘when you’re going up the outside lane of the motorway, cars pull over. Going up at 70mph, mind you, of course – both my son, and my daughter’s boyfriend, are policemen, and so was my dad!
‘My wife Susan chose the colour – silver seemed too innocuous, while the red and yellow were too garish. I bought the car, but she bought the number plate’ – which features Richard’s initials, as well as his surname. The ZS had been offered in either four-door saloon or five-door hatchback guise, with the marginally stiffer four-door being the one that had distinguished itself in British Touring Car racing. Richard’s was a hatchback, with lingering pine needles in the back indicating a boot big enough to take a Christmas tree.
As well as two diesel options, the ZS had come in either 120 form, with the four-cylinder, 1796cc, 117bhp K-Series engine good for 120mph (though it was not, as on the ZR, offered in 160bhp VVC mode); or as the rortier 180, with the six-cylinder, 2497cc, 177bhp, delivering 0-60mph in 7.3 seconds and a top speed of a shade under 140mph. (There was also, late on, an economy ZS 110 with a 1.6-litre K-Series motor, though not many of them seem to have been made.) Had Richard been tempted by the 180? ‘Yes, but head ruled heart for a change! It was going to be my wife’s car mainly; and the 180 only does about 25 miles to the gallon, where this one is good for 35-plus.’ The 180 was also said to need to be revved to give of its best, while the 120, as I would soon discover, had a really flexible, responsive engine. And no, Richard had experienced none of the head-gasket problems sometimes associated with the K-Series engine on either of his cars.
Fully Loaded
The ZS may have been fundamentally dated, but it was well-equipped. You had to press the ‘entry’ switch on the key fob for the remote central locking, or the engine wouldn’t start; the immobiliser set itself a minute or so after you left the car, and there’s an alarm as well; anti-lock brakes, electronic brakeforce distribution, twin front- and side-airbags plus remote boot opening, were all part of the package.
Getting in for a spin, the doors were light and tinny feeling, no clunk. The first good surprise was that the sports seats with their side bolsters were wide enough to accommodate me perfectly, unlike the perched-up pose I’d experienced on the ZR’s version. The ‘Black Oak’ effect dash with its silver-faced instruments had also been revised for 2004, with new switches, steering column stalks, and rotary (rather than oblong) air vents, all to further distinguish the ZS from the 45; the air vents had acquired satin-chrome edgings, while the air conditioning was altered from just on/off to variable ATC. I liked the chequered seat fabric and the small diameter sports steering wheel with the ‘modern’ MG logo cheerfully in the middle. Though room in the back was undeniably limited, this was a comfortable, functional cockpit.
‘The best thing about the car is the handling, the worst thing is the ride,’ Richard had warned, ‘on our roads you lose all the suspension, all the softness.’ He’d also said that the suspension squeaked a little untill it was warmed up, but I was barely aware of that. The first impression, which the whole ride would confirm, was how over damp, twisting roads on a very windy day, the roadholding felt absolutely reliable as you played tunes with third and fourth on the five-speed gearbox. On 15-spoke, 17-inch ‘straight’ alloy wheels, the low-profile tyres, which Richard had said would soon need replacing, were surface-sensitive at low speeds; but this only added to the ‘driver’s car’ feel of the plot, and never produced anxiety. The engine was wonderfully, notably responsive, and the car felt light and conspicuously well-balanced – even Car had conceded its ‘near-perfect chassis balance’. The suspension, advanced twin-wishbone at the front,with a multi-link rear axle and those firm springs, gave you the control which made its firmness seem worthwhile.
There were a couple of downsides, one relatively minor, the other less so. Rear visibility was noticeably restricted, with the back window a pillbox-like slit, bisected horizontally by the slim, sharp spoiler – which Richard said was just the right height at night to block out headlamp dazzle from the rear! Even the view in the prettily-styled egg-shaped door mirrors was somewhat restricted.
But the real problem was the gearchange. The clutch was wonderfully light, but its pedal, like that of the ZR, had been revised in ’04 to bring it into line with the throttle and brake ones, and this meant that you needed to press your foot right into the floor, pointing your toes, to achieve clean changes, or indeed sometimes any changes at all, into, say, first, from second at rest, or into reverse. It hadn’t happened on Richard’s earlier model, and it wasn’t a problem for his wife, who changed into first while still moving, and had smaller feet. In addition, almost all the gearchanges were the crunchy side of notchy. It was an irritating blemish on a package where otherwise, excellent disc brakes all round, a nicely subdued rasping engine note, that flexible engine and sports suspension, combined to produce – an MG: a saloon tweaked to make driving it fun.
And an MG that today is conspicuously good value. How much, I asked Richard as we rolled into Abingdon Car Restorations, could he expect to get for this clean, 2005 car, with mileage around the mid-30,000 mark? ‘I’d be lucky to see four grand for it,’ he said. ‘But we’ll keep it. We’ve cleared the residual payments and don’t owe anything on it, and we like it.’ If ever there was a car to exemplify the rising trend, discussed in a recent CCM, of people opting for a ‘modern classic’ that can be driven all year round, with potential benefits like cheaper road tax if it’s pre-2002, and cheaper insurance for vehicles over ten years old – the ZS would seem to be a prime candidate. In view of its reputation, driving it had been a most pleasant surprise.
Back at the Shack
Then it was time to be re-united with our MGB. Steve Illing had welded on the ends of the bumper’s mounting arms, and shimmed the bumper in. Because ‘not many people know’ that to compensate for unevenness and stop the black bumpers rubbing on the bodywork (which mine had been doing), they were shimmed in, usually with a different number on either side. Mine had had three shims on one side, and a single one on the other. ‘It’s two, and three, now,’ grinned Steve,’ and I’ve put on the little covers above them – they’re bent back to stop you counting the variation in shims on each side!’
The MGB – live and learn, eh?
Article from Classic Car Mart
I am currently a man of constant (automotive) sorrow; I and my family too. My wife’s 14-year-old 4x4 horsebox-tug, fresh from a £400 bill for brake renewal, decided to lose the use of its clutch. She opted to have it fixed by a local work-at-your-home mechanic, whose van flank bears the slogan: ‘An Eagle in a Field of Turkeys.’ Well, the eagle has flown for the last several days, leaving the 4x4 reared up in our drive on a pair of red-and-white axle stands, with its entire transmission housing lying among nuts, bolts and rusting clutch plates on the wet gravel beneath. I’m looking out at it now.
Rubber Bumper-less
No problem, we thought. Our MGB, 456, would fill the breach while the wife was using my car. Despite the odd rough edge, and living out in the winter weather, 456 has always been dead reliable. So a few days ago, I went off in the MG to do the weekly shop. About two miles out, it stalled at a junction on a downslope – I’d put the choke in too soon, I thought. Re-started, and was greeted by a fearful noise. But the clutch, unwisely not replaced when the reconditioned engine had been fitted, did that sometimes; and by the time we got to Sainsburys, things had quietened down.Shopping done, I got in and turned the key. Nothing. Feared the cold weather had taken its toll on the battery, the same Halfords one the car had come with four years ago, I had a look under the back seat where it lives. No loose connections, so I called the RAC. A commendable 40 minutes later, up rolled the orange van. A young-ish patrol soon discounted the battery theory, had the front end up on a trolley jack, whacked the starter motor a few times, and declared it defunct.
He said he couldn’t tow me to my guys at Abingdon Car Restorations (ACR), as the towing eye on these models is only on the bumper, not screwed into the chassis. A push start got nowhere, other than nearly giving a friendly, elderly Sainsburys trolley guy a heart attack. RAC man then asked if I would risk a tow-start. Yes I would, so we tried it, in second, gathered speed, let the clutch out, engine caught, then died. Running out of car park, he tows me round the corner but is too eager to catch a gap in traffic and pulls away too fast. I watch helplessly as the loose tow-strap snaps taut, and bang! Suddenly I’m going nowhere and all he’s towing is the front bumper…
RAC man never quibbles over whose fault it was, so he and a burly site worker soon push the MG into life and we proceeded in convoy, me revving hard at junctions, to Steve and Ray at ACR. Much mirth, no problem. If we’d put the tow-strap round behind the front wishbones, they said, we’d have been OK. The RAC to their credit authorised payment for the job in two working days. We now wear a fresh, welded-on bumper and a recently rebuilt starter motor. But meanwhile, driving the grown-up car down a narrow wet lane, approaching a giant puddle, I expected the car coming the other way to let me through first, as I was closer, and it was a police car… but on he came, and our off-side mirrors clipped and shattered. Perfectly amiable, knock-for-knock – but it’s left me wondering which of the emergency services I’ll be having the next go-round with!
Underdog MG
Over recent months, I’d been lucky enough to have tried two out of three of the ‘modern’ MG Rover Z-Series cars; a nice MG ZT-T, and a perky MG ZR. Time to make up the set, and ACR just happened to know the owner of a clean, late example locally.
I knew him too, as it turned out. Richard Day had been the owner of the RV8-styled GT which I’d briefly contemplated purchasing, only to see it go for £4000 to a new home in Dusseldorf. What is it with the German connection? My Minor-driving pal Axel now also has one for his wife and another for his son, in addition to a 1948 M-Series Morris 10 and a Vanden Plas 1100. And his friend Manfred has just found a better ZA Magnette than the ones I’ve tested recently. We may have won the war, but we’re losing the heritage!
Richard Day works as an engineer at the Rutherford laboratory in Harwell and got into MGs aged around 40 when a colleague turned up in a modern TF. After various ‘Bs’, he bought his first, Trophy Blue ZS 120+, brand new. ‘We got it early in 2002, just after they came out, for around £12,000, from our local MG Rover dealer, Kernahans of Witney, where the owner Martin Kernahan had a ZR which he ran as a rally car. Everybody got a company finance deal via the XPower website that was so good you couldn’t refuse it.
‘The blue one was the first new car I ever bought,’ grinned Richard, a large, genial guy. ‘Up to then I’d always bought motors with 100,000 miles on them. We did 36,000 miles in the first car with no problems, and we liked it, so when we were looking for a replacement for our high mileage Vauxhall Carlton, we traded in the old ZS and got this one, also new. It’s another 120+, only by 2005 they’d taken the ‘+’ off – it had mainly meant electric windows and air-con. Yes, 2005 – we bought it about six weeks before the company went belly-up…’
Many would raise an eyebrow at Richard’s choice, and not just because of the timing. The ZR had been acknowledged as a fun, cheeky little hatchback, and the ZT as a fast, handsome package with sophisticated suspension. But the ZS? Like the others, it had derived directly from the Rover range, in this case from the Rover 45, essentially a warmed-over 400 that itself had derived from the mid-Nineties’ Honda Civic – nothing wrong with that, just that it was relatively dated. It was felt to be an old man’s car, and sat uneasily between the small family and medium-sized sectors, with limited room in the back seat. On the one hand it was dearer than a Ford Focus, on the other it lacked the size/capacity of a Mondeo or Passat. Imperious Car magazine dismissed the 45 as ‘Britain’s second worst car,’ (no, I don’t know what they thought the worst one was). When it came to the ZS, What Car? in 2002 considered its looks ‘boy-racer’, and Car, while acknowledging the ZS’ ‘great handling’ and ‘fun performance’, summed it up witheringly as ‘a re-polished turd’.
Zed Head
Harsh, as my daughter would say, and when Richard’s late, XPower Grey model rolled into our drive, I could immediately write off the ‘boy racer’ bit – this was a well-styled car with real presence. The model’s 2004 face-lift, though the loss of twin headlamps was lamented, had been effective for the ZSs. It had incorporated elements from the MG SV, with the front splitter extended into the pronounced wheelarch and side-skirt extensions, as well as a ZT-style, better integrated grille and headlamp revision. The ZS also got a new tailgate and boot, and a new rear bumper and spoiler. It added up, in my book, to discreetly aggressive looks.
‘The way the front end looks,’ Richard laughed, ‘when you’re going up the outside lane of the motorway, cars pull over. Going up at 70mph, mind you, of course – both my son, and my daughter’s boyfriend, are policemen, and so was my dad!
‘My wife Susan chose the colour – silver seemed too innocuous, while the red and yellow were too garish. I bought the car, but she bought the number plate’ – which features Richard’s initials, as well as his surname. The ZS had been offered in either four-door saloon or five-door hatchback guise, with the marginally stiffer four-door being the one that had distinguished itself in British Touring Car racing. Richard’s was a hatchback, with lingering pine needles in the back indicating a boot big enough to take a Christmas tree.
As well as two diesel options, the ZS had come in either 120 form, with the four-cylinder, 1796cc, 117bhp K-Series engine good for 120mph (though it was not, as on the ZR, offered in 160bhp VVC mode); or as the rortier 180, with the six-cylinder, 2497cc, 177bhp, delivering 0-60mph in 7.3 seconds and a top speed of a shade under 140mph. (There was also, late on, an economy ZS 110 with a 1.6-litre K-Series motor, though not many of them seem to have been made.) Had Richard been tempted by the 180? ‘Yes, but head ruled heart for a change! It was going to be my wife’s car mainly; and the 180 only does about 25 miles to the gallon, where this one is good for 35-plus.’ The 180 was also said to need to be revved to give of its best, while the 120, as I would soon discover, had a really flexible, responsive engine. And no, Richard had experienced none of the head-gasket problems sometimes associated with the K-Series engine on either of his cars.
Fully Loaded
The ZS may have been fundamentally dated, but it was well-equipped. You had to press the ‘entry’ switch on the key fob for the remote central locking, or the engine wouldn’t start; the immobiliser set itself a minute or so after you left the car, and there’s an alarm as well; anti-lock brakes, electronic brakeforce distribution, twin front- and side-airbags plus remote boot opening, were all part of the package.
Getting in for a spin, the doors were light and tinny feeling, no clunk. The first good surprise was that the sports seats with their side bolsters were wide enough to accommodate me perfectly, unlike the perched-up pose I’d experienced on the ZR’s version. The ‘Black Oak’ effect dash with its silver-faced instruments had also been revised for 2004, with new switches, steering column stalks, and rotary (rather than oblong) air vents, all to further distinguish the ZS from the 45; the air vents had acquired satin-chrome edgings, while the air conditioning was altered from just on/off to variable ATC. I liked the chequered seat fabric and the small diameter sports steering wheel with the ‘modern’ MG logo cheerfully in the middle. Though room in the back was undeniably limited, this was a comfortable, functional cockpit.
‘The best thing about the car is the handling, the worst thing is the ride,’ Richard had warned, ‘on our roads you lose all the suspension, all the softness.’ He’d also said that the suspension squeaked a little untill it was warmed up, but I was barely aware of that. The first impression, which the whole ride would confirm, was how over damp, twisting roads on a very windy day, the roadholding felt absolutely reliable as you played tunes with third and fourth on the five-speed gearbox. On 15-spoke, 17-inch ‘straight’ alloy wheels, the low-profile tyres, which Richard had said would soon need replacing, were surface-sensitive at low speeds; but this only added to the ‘driver’s car’ feel of the plot, and never produced anxiety. The engine was wonderfully, notably responsive, and the car felt light and conspicuously well-balanced – even Car had conceded its ‘near-perfect chassis balance’. The suspension, advanced twin-wishbone at the front,with a multi-link rear axle and those firm springs, gave you the control which made its firmness seem worthwhile.
There were a couple of downsides, one relatively minor, the other less so. Rear visibility was noticeably restricted, with the back window a pillbox-like slit, bisected horizontally by the slim, sharp spoiler – which Richard said was just the right height at night to block out headlamp dazzle from the rear! Even the view in the prettily-styled egg-shaped door mirrors was somewhat restricted.
But the real problem was the gearchange. The clutch was wonderfully light, but its pedal, like that of the ZR, had been revised in ’04 to bring it into line with the throttle and brake ones, and this meant that you needed to press your foot right into the floor, pointing your toes, to achieve clean changes, or indeed sometimes any changes at all, into, say, first, from second at rest, or into reverse. It hadn’t happened on Richard’s earlier model, and it wasn’t a problem for his wife, who changed into first while still moving, and had smaller feet. In addition, almost all the gearchanges were the crunchy side of notchy. It was an irritating blemish on a package where otherwise, excellent disc brakes all round, a nicely subdued rasping engine note, that flexible engine and sports suspension, combined to produce – an MG: a saloon tweaked to make driving it fun.
And an MG that today is conspicuously good value. How much, I asked Richard as we rolled into Abingdon Car Restorations, could he expect to get for this clean, 2005 car, with mileage around the mid-30,000 mark? ‘I’d be lucky to see four grand for it,’ he said. ‘But we’ll keep it. We’ve cleared the residual payments and don’t owe anything on it, and we like it.’ If ever there was a car to exemplify the rising trend, discussed in a recent CCM, of people opting for a ‘modern classic’ that can be driven all year round, with potential benefits like cheaper road tax if it’s pre-2002, and cheaper insurance for vehicles over ten years old – the ZS would seem to be a prime candidate. In view of its reputation, driving it had been a most pleasant surprise.
Back at the Shack
Then it was time to be re-united with our MGB. Steve Illing had welded on the ends of the bumper’s mounting arms, and shimmed the bumper in. Because ‘not many people know’ that to compensate for unevenness and stop the black bumpers rubbing on the bodywork (which mine had been doing), they were shimmed in, usually with a different number on either side. Mine had had three shims on one side, and a single one on the other. ‘It’s two, and three, now,’ grinned Steve,’ and I’ve put on the little covers above them – they’re bent back to stop you counting the variation in shims on each side!’
The MGB – live and learn, eh?