MG Sports Cars

What would you have done differently with the upcoming MGB GT V8 model?

Assuming MG (in Abingdon) had secured a go-ahead and a VERY MODEST development budget from British Leyland management to create a new "MGB GT V8" model - and that they had to work within that basic brief (budget, time schedule, etc.) - how would the design have been different under your management?

Need some background info? The current issue of "British V8" contains 17 articles on the "factory" MGB GT V8, including original press releases, multiple magazine reviews, etc., etc. You can review them from here: [www.britishv8.org]
Now, we're putting together a great big "part two" - with more detailed info on the MGB GT V8, but also with more "contextual info" including articles on the Costello V8 and other things going on in those times.

Here's a suggested ground rule... if your proposal would add significant cost to the car, I propose that you should accompany your proposal with an off-setting cost-reduction proposal. (I can tell you from personal experience, that's the way real automotive OEM's think!) All suggestions should be backed up with a little explanation / rationale. Let's try to come up with some realistic, interesting and innovative proposals. This should be fun!

Just for the heck of it, I'll kick this off with a couple quick ideas:

Here's a modest idea. Because less is sometimes so much more... I would have deleted that stupid back seat. Anyone who really wants a back seat will be happy to buy one as a dealer-installed option anyway. (Dealers love dealer installed options!) The back seat in an MGB GT is "dead weight" and wasted expense, and it just says "low performance" all over it. Eliminating it would have increased cargo capacity too. Eliminating the seat would have improved access to the batteries.

In lieu of the back seat, I would have tried to negotiate for adding a battery disconnect switch as standard equipment. (Eliminating the back seat would offset cost and production-line time-balancing issues.)

Here's a not-so-modest idea:

I would have called up the guys at Pressed Steel and challenged them to recreate the famous "Sebring Fenders" in steel as a standard feature of the MGB GT V8. If you think about it, styling and styling approval are quite time-consuming and expensive processes for car manufacturers - but in this particular case the styling work had already been done! It would have been comparitively quick and easy to document the shape of the original flares. (The original flares on the 1968 "factory" MGC GT race cars hand-formed from aluminum, and then rivetted to standard steel fenders.) The standard MGB front fenders are already a fabrication of some ten smaller steel parts... how much complexity are you really adding to go from ten to eleven, if that's required? Maybe this would be the time to invest in some new tooling, for a reduction in part cost?

Many customers (and the press) complained that the car wasn't more flamboyantly styled. For the price premium, it looked too much like a standard MGB GT. Think about it though... changing the fenders alone would DRAMATICALLY change the overall look of the car!

The MGB GT V8 was destined to have custom wheels anyway. By reducing the offset of the Dunlop wheels, they could easily be made to fill the Sebring-flared fenders. Alternatively, wider tires could have been fitted, for a nice performance enhancement. The flared fenders, in steel, would surely have been extremely popular as a service part through MG's "Special Tuning" parts operation.

What about cost? I believe MG could largely have offset the cost of Sebring flares by removing some of the base model's standard brightwork. The V8 would have looked sportier and more purposeful - and more distinctive - with less trim. Specifically, the body molding down the side of the car would have been easy to eliminate. Most people don't realize how good the drip rail on the GT roof looks painted body-color (with the trim simply omitted.) Eliminating the drip rail would have streamlined the car and reduced wind noise slightly. Eliminating the vent-a-plane windows from the doors would have dramatically cut wind noise, which was one of the loudest complaints of magazine reviewers! The bright trim on the windshield and and hatch glass don't say "performance" to me either.

First I would have exported it to the US for God's sake!

The Sebring fenders are an excellent addition as well as removing the back seat. My performance addition would have to be an IRS. Maybe a DeDion rear if the IRS was too expensive but to me the rear suspension is the weak point of the MGs.

Very good ideas. Personally, I'd have ditched the SU's immediately, fitted a low rise 4 bbl intake, carb and filter and done whatever had to be done to get it under the hood. Just that one change would have been enough to take on the American muscle car market that was under siege from emissions controls, broadening the market for the car immensely. It could probably have been done for considerably less than the system that was used, perhaps enough less to have upgraded the transmission as well without incurring extra cost. Of course, a sizeable part of standard MGB production would then have to be diverted to the V8 to supply the demand, but in doing so the offering would be diversified a bit, offering the roadster as well as the GT.

Sorry for offering such an obvious suggestion, but hey, somebody had to do it, right?

Jim

Get one set up for racing, pull off anything that would add weight, hire Parnelli Jones, and go out there and win
races. That would get a whole bunch sold, so the damn place wouldn't have gone out of business.
Marc

I'm in total agreement with you guys:

1) the single biggest mistake was not actually offering a LHD version - although it was developed, prototyped, and even shown at the New York Motor Show! This mistake, however, was apparently made by BLMC management - not anyone at Abingdon - and it was made after 1972.

2) the rear suspension certainly SHOULD have been improved (although I think a 3-link would probably be cheaper and easier to implement than a DeDion suspension. Review the Rover 3500's DeDion, as pictured in the current issue... it's pretty nifty, but it doesn't look inexpensive or easy to package on an MGB.)

3) a single four-barrel seems like such a no brainer! A single carb doesn't need to be "synchronized" when you build up the engine, or later in service. There are fewer places for vacuum or fuel leaks, and thus fewer warranty claims. Cost savings in the air filtration system would have been absolutely huge. While we're on the subject, why on Earth did they paint the cast aluminum intake manifolds? Bizarre. Did you know that on the show cars they even painted the SU carbs? That's even more bizarre!

4) racing would have been great for marketing... however, that's mostly outside of the scope of this "scenario." (Remember, it's still 1972 and the car is still in development. Besides, marketing was apparently outside of the authority and responsibility of anyone at Abingdon.) However, it would be possible to quietly prime the pump a little by sharing information and cast-off parts to friendly and competitive private racers. Of the seven left-hand drive MGB GT V8 "prototypes", at least three eventually turned into race cars!!!

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One of the tall tales that BLMC liked to tell was that there just wasn't enough production capacity to build more Rover V8 engines.

My suggestion to BLMC management: plan on adding a second shift!

(Incidentally, when the Arab oil embargo hit, there was instantly plenty of production capacity to support MG's use of this engine. The sticker price of the MGB GT V8 should logically have been reduced somewhat, but instead it was increased.)

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I've got about 100 more suggestions for practical design "improvements". Here are two:

1) Sound-absorbing headliner - The MGB GT V8 is inevitably loud for occupants, largely because of the large amount of glass at ear level. This was a big gripe in the magazine reviews. However, the standard GT headliner is just meadboard covered with a thin vinyl film. By 1972, it would have been practical to add a layer of thin foam to the meadboard and then cover it with a perforated or textile cover for a substantial reduction in cabin noise, at a modest cost.

2) Eliminate the heavy plywood hinged/carpeted tray over the spare tire (or at least make it optional). I'm actually in the process right now of designing a sort of tonneau cover that will replace this part on my car. It'll be held in place by snaps. When it's unsnapped and folded-up, there'll be more total cargo capacity. (I've never carried a spare tire in my car, so in my case this change should facilitate hauling around boxes as large as about twenty inches tall. I'm thinking about including "wings" on the vinyl cover to hide the contents of the cavities behind the tail lights.)

Your turn!

Here are a couple provocative questions for you guys. When was the Borg-Warner T-50 5-speed first introduced? More to the point, was it available early enough that MG could have used it instead of their own 4-speed-plus-overdrive? If so, wouldn't most customers have preferred a real five speed over a 4-speed plus overdrive? The T-50 would have easily handled the higher torque of the high-compression version of the Rover engine, and would have been popular with racers. Borg-Warner was already a major supplier of automatic transmissions to BLMC, including the automatic in the Rover 3500S.

Seems to me that BL really missed the boat by not offering a V8 roadster version - GT's are nice but a traditional sportscar is more likely to be an open top convertible a la Cobra, Corvette or Tiger..... it's been pretty well accepted that the roadster unibody can support the additional power (even Costello proved that!)
.........and the RV8 was too little, too late.

MGB V8 roadster? But wouldn't that cut into sales of the Triumph TR6? So many of the bad decisions of British Leyland seem best understood by (erroneously) assuming that everything is a zero sum game. In reality, hardly anything really is. It's always seemed odd to me that MG-Abingdon didn't go out of their way to prove the adequacy of the roadster bodyshell for V8 use. What did they have to lose?

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Here's another product spec change suggestion:

Eliminate the oil cooler, and instead budget its cost toward installing a decent air dam. If the air dam is any good at all, it will improve overall cooling system efficiency. The streamlining effect of a decent air dam will also add a mph or two to top speed.

Especially since MGB GT V8 was only offered in the cool, damp British home market, the insistance on fitting an oil cooler as standard equipment has always struck me as pretty dumb.

",,,hire Parnelli Jones"

In 1972, I'll take Mark Donohue!

Good answers so far.

Limited slip with a touch more power in the motor.

tube shocks in the front not because it needed it, but to set it off from the standard or use the now defunct tooling for the MGC front torsion bar suspension to once again set this apart from a standard MGB.

Deeper fuel tank with slightly more capacity. This is not needed but a great bragging point that the car can go further than...

or maybe as a deeper tank with narrower width so a person could purchase the car with dual exhaust- I don't care for duals on my own car, but its a great marketing scheme.

Dashboard redesign. Not that the MG dash is bad, but for goodness sakes, if you want it to be a different car, set the style as slightly different.

GT rear glass could have been altered too pretty easy and inexpensively.

Anything to set the car of a bit from the standard MGB would have increased sales even though I enjoy a standard MGB as much as the next fellow, knowing that there were options could have potentially sold me on a car.

-BMC.

I'm not sure if the T-50 was available in '72 but it would have been about that time that it was. I looked at a new Olds Omega in '73 or '74 which had that as an option behind a V6 and it was a brand new thing, so BW might had had it available as early as '72 or they might not. Either way it could have been put into the pipeline and offered soon afterwards because it would be quite certainly offered to the manufacturers by then.

I like the suggestion of offering the B with the C's torsion front suspension. This should have been done as a matter of course as a regular upgrade or improvement to the line, and I don't see how it would have added any cost to do it. This could have been accompanied by making stiffer bars available for performance use (possibly the standard C bars would have worked, re-labeled), adding a nice little profit item along the way. The natural accompaniment to this upgrade would have been an inexpensive 3 link rear and it seems they had already been considering the Jag unit for the rear as well, maybe some variation of that could have been done.

Jim