MG Sports Cars

You probably noticed, but just in case you didn't...

We've uploaded a BRAND NEW edition of The British V8 Newsletter, and you can get it all for FREE (all 55 articles and all 700 photos) by clicking on the big "Newsletter" pull-down-menu button at the top of your screen and selecting "Read the Current Issue". Read the articles by selecting their titles with your mouse. Make sure you read each article right to the very bottom before going to the next one. (Our vendor-sponsors will be grateful, I'm sure.) Enjoy!

Thank you for your email alerting me to the Newsletter, what a magnificent piece it is to, its going to take me weeks to read through it all . I was suprised to see in the police review that a V8 was £2300 when new ,when a Mini was about £1200 then,it was quite an expensive car ,but the petrol (gas) crisis over here killed it and fuel prices went up and up (they never seem to have stopped since.) I have had a lot of enquiries for my car ,mostly from Germany and Belgium (2 viewings next weekend ),but as the £ has been devalued to the Euro ,it makes it a cheap car for them ,a bit like us buying from USA at the moment !!

Thank you Nigel!

Quote:

but the petrol (gas) crisis over here killed it

You know, that particular argument has never made much sense to me. I believe British Leyland made a BIG marketing mistake for not emphasizing (a) how remarkably efficient the MGB GT V8 actually was (on the highway it's only about 2mpg worse than a regular MGB GT) and (b) how its low-compression engine meant that it could be operated on significantly cheaper fuel than many of the cars it was competing against (including a regular MGB GT).

Moreover, the fuel crises would have made the MGB GT V8 much more competitive in the US market where many consumers were in a panic to trade-in horribly inefficient "muscle cars" yet didn't want to totally give up on performance.

As far how the MGB GT V8 was originally priced... I haven't yet found credible information on what the car cost to produce, but there are suggestions in some of the articles that BLMC management priced the MGB GT V8 high to protect the Triumph Stag (which would be a weird thing to do, since the Stag was really in an entirely different niche.) The Costello V8 had sold at a significantly higher price.