Author Archives: Mark Braunstein

Summer is here and when the sun shines a young man’s fancy turns to sports cars.

So this (old) man heads to Malvern Link, home of Morgan, and to the driver’s seat of a 4/4, the world’s oldest new car, now in its 81st year of production.

Now of course Porsches and Ferraris go faster, Mazda MX-5s are sweeter to drive and Caterhams steer and stop better. But if your priorities are wind-in-the-hair fun, turn-up-the-volume driving engagement and a passport back to a gentler motoring era, then nothing can beat a Morgan.

They are mostly made as they always were: hand-built using mallets and files and saws and human sweat, and crafted from traditional materials. Indeed the frames of the oldest classic models, like the 4/4, are still made from ash. They are far more hand-wrought than any Bentley or Rolls-Royce, whose bodies are invariably made by machine and whose hand-craftsmanship is typically confined to cabin carpentry and trim leathersmithery, plus the odd commissioned bespoke flourish.

Little has changed since the 4/4 was new. Morgan is still an independent family-owned company. The manufacturing technique is so unusual and old-fashioned that factory tours (£20) are a popular attraction. Last year, 30,000 people took the tour and, in typical English style, it includes afternoon tea. It gets five stars on Trip Advisor.

Our Morgan has a modem 110bhp 1.6-litre Ford engine and a previous-gen Mazda MX-‘5 five-speed gearbox but in every other way it’s about as mechanically similar to a new saloon as a Spitfire is to a 787.

Take the windows. There are none. Instead, we find side screens that we unclip and leave behind. It is a beautiful summer’s day, so no need for weather protection.  Also, no need to put up the fabric roof, coiled behind our heads. There are only two seats and entry is by a tiny shallow door, opened by a latch.  The door has leather pull-straps.  It appears to weigh nothing.

The steering wheel is wood rimmed and alloy spoked -forget about an airbag – and it’s large and upright, closer to your chest than a modern car’s. The dash is a plank of varnished walnut. The only digital display is total mileage. This is not a digital-age car.

Out front there is a little upright chrome-ringed windscreen, and a long bonnet, elegantly sculpted, hand formed and tethered-by leather straps.  Little louvres help the engine breathe.  We see twin like-frog’s eyes, and elegant sweeping round fenders.

The (optional) side-exiting exhaust is just under your right shoulder. It barks into action when you turn the key – you can smell the fumes on start-up – and the engine soon settles into an uneven and throaty idle.

Its smallness and all-aluminium body makes for a light car, just under 800kg. There is no power steering, so turning the big wood-rimmed wheel when stationary or at low speed requires shoulder and arm heft. Clutch and brake pedal are also heavy.

It feels and sounds fast but isn’t. This is a car that’s all about sensation, not measurement. Just as cycling at 20mph feels faster than driving at 60mph, so the Morgan feels fast beyond the speedo’s numbers. The ride is firm and easily unsettled and the handling lacks finesse. But what do you expect from an 8o-year-old design, whose rear suspension owes more to a wheelbarrow than double wishbones? Like all old cars, it needs manhandling and heft; anticipation and concentration; and, yes, just a little love and understanding.

It’s designed for the winding narrow roads of England of 70 or 80 years ago, which still gently crisscross much of the country’s rolling green land. They are wonderful driving roads. Speed is irrelevant. The slower, the better. You’re always interacting with your environment: with the weather, with nature and its many scents and sounds, and with the car itself. It is a different type of motoring, totally alien to the hermetically sealed air-conditioned cabins in which we today rush hither and thither, isolated from everything around us, in a world bulldozed for speed.

Every once in a while, it’s good to be transported back to sports cars of yore and to the driving world of yesteryear.

Only an old classic, or a new Morgan, can do this. It helps us to understand how much cars have improved and, just as important, how much raw driving enjoyment has been diluted.

Robert Lea, July 17 2017

Skilled craftsmen at the Morgan Motor Company, the last of Britain’s family-controlled carmakers (MORGAN MOTOR COMPANY)

Of all Britain’s great heritage motoring marques founded a century or more ago, you will not find many where the founding family remains involved.

Where are the descendants of Rolls and Royce and Bentley, or Herbert Austin or William Morris or William Lyons of Jaguar or Lionel Martin who took his cars up Aston Hill?

In fact, there is just the one: founded 108 years ago and still wholly in the hands of the family, the Morgan Motor Company, whose factory nestles in the lee of the Malvern Hills, is still building retro classic sports cars with frames fashioned from the wood of the ash. That family ownership is looking a little more assured after an extraordinary bust-up with Charles Morgan, grandson of the founder HFS Morgan, was finally settled after more than three years of bitter wrangling.

The Morgan board, albeit with none of the family in an executive position, is now hoping for a period of stability so it can begin production of electric versions of its famous bullet-shaped three-wheelers by the end of the year.

The 2016 accounts just published by Morgan reveal a business employing 200 people, many of them highly skilled craftsmen, making 800 cars a year with a turnover of £30 million and a profit of £700,000. The plan is that this year will bring in £35 million of revenues and £1.3 million of profit, throwing off cash that can be invested in its electric dream, and to start paying the family again after a dividend drought.

Just last month it bought back its historic Malvern factory in a £7.2 million deal, reversing a transaction ten years ago that was used to fund the development of its top of the range all-aluminium Aero 8 cars, which start at £92,000 apiece and sales of which are fueling larger revenues and better margins.

As important is the end of the feud that threatened to tear the company — and the family — apart. Charles Morgan was relieved of his executive duties in late 2013 amid a war of words in the press and on social media. The nature of his alleged misdemeanors has never been disclosed. In an outbreak of peace, however, an embarrassing date at the employment tribunal has been averted and Mr Morgan, a 30 per cent shareholder, is back in the fold. “The family is now tightly aligned,” according to Dominic Riley, who was brought in last year as Morgan chairman.

The rest of the company is owned by Charles Morgan’s sister Jill Price, with 11 per cent; a family trust set up by their late father, Peter, which holds 48 per cent; and a further 11 per cent split between Craig Hamilton-Smith (son of Charles’s late sister Sonia and her husband, the Tory peer Lord Colwyn) and his sister Jacqui, married to the actor Sean Pertwee. It means that Mr Riley and Steve Morris, a former company apprentice who worked his way up to become Morgan’s managing director, can get on with what happens next. “We are saying ‘make it better then make it great’,” Mr Riley said. “We have been at only break-even for several years.”

That means Morgan will not be going anywhere near the mainstream soon. Production rates may reach 1,000 a year but no more. In 1991 the company was producing 400 a year when Sir John Harvey-Jones’s Troubleshooter programme visited and the Morgan family famously rejected his “change or die” advice.

The company produces 800 cars a year including the Plus 8 (MORGAN MOTOR COMPANY)

“We want to retain the exclusivity,” Mr Riley said. “We have a waiting list of six to nine months with which we are comfortable. We build to order.”

Those orders are increasingly for the Aero 8 range with its top of the range BMW engines. More than half the production remains the classic ash-framed Morgans which use Ford engines and start from £39,000. About a fifth of production is the £35,000 Morgan three-wheeler which uses a Harley-Davidson derivative motorcycle engine with a feisty Mazda MX5 powertrain.

The company’s ambitions are focused on making electric versions of the Morgan 3 in a project with Frazer-Nash, the engineering consultancy. The promise is that the new Morgan 3 will sound less like Peter Fonda in Easy Rider and more like Anakin Skywalker pod-racing in Star Wars. Mr Morris said the family was keen to avoid the mistakes of other heritage brands that have been on more than nodding acquaintance with the insolvency accountants over the years — marques such as Aston Martin, which has gone bust seven times, and Lotus, which has long been stuck in the slow lane.

“We need to build a sustainable business,” Mr Morris said. “If we are making money building 800 cars a year, that’s fine. Brilliant if we can do 1,000 a year and make money.”

A new book, set to be released on 15 July 2017, that might interest some of us.   Possibly a good item for the Holiday List??  Or if you just can’t wait, it is available on Amazon for pre-orders.

By James Taylor
Hardback •  144 pages • 155 pictures

ISBN: 978-1-787110-26-7

Chapters

1 – Origins and GM versions of the engine
2 – Purchase of design and manufacturing rights by Rover; preparing the engine for UK production; development
3 – Production 3.5 engines, 1968-1976
4 – Production 3.5 engines, 1976-1989
5 – 3.9 and 4.2 engines, 1989-1995
6 – 4.0 and 4.6 engines, 1996-2004
7 – Afterlife in small-volume production
Appx A – V8 engine identification numbers

We will post a book report when we have one.  Enjoy, Mark