The future of the MG brand was under question following the closure of the Abingdon factory in 1980. The notion of British Leyland selling the company was floated, and amongst others, Aston Martin Lagonda put together a proposal.
Classic Cars magazine (November 1984) describes how the AML consortium made an offer, which was welcomed by MG owners and the Abingdon employees alike, and details the common culture of the two small, specialist firms. AML embarked upon a six-month programme in which it commissioned designer William Towns to style both an interim facelift of the existing MGB and an all-new model for 1983/84. Towns had to retain the ugly federal-reg bumpers for the facelift, but replaced the chrome side strips with deep black side cladding which detracted from the bumpers and made the car appear lower. A deeper front air dam was fitted to the prototype, white Wolfrace alloys and Tickford Recaro-style sports seats. It looks not dissimilar to MG's own later RV8. The proposal for the 1983/84 car got as far as the clay modelling stage; although the models themselves were broken up, surviving drawings show a design centred around a basic roadster body, but with a series of detachable hardtops, seat layouts and a removable bootlid to transform it between body configurations. The car could work as a roadster, a hatchback coupe, a fastback GT or even two-door estate - "one base vehicle can provide its owner with a transition from bachelorhood, through marital bliss, to a young family and even back again", read the proposal's blurb. However, the AML bid foundered as it failed to secure enough financial backing, and this versatile concept never went any further.
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| 1984 Metro 6R4 |
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British Leyland saw fit to revive the MG badge in 1982 - applied to the sported-up version of its Austin Metro city car. The MG Metro - a 1.3-litre with 72bhp, alloy wheels, sports seats and rear spoiler wasn't quite the travesty of the Octagon badge that some pundits claimed, but the turbocharged version (93bhp, uprated suspension and wheel arch extensions) was a little more credible as a hot hatch, if not an all-out performance car. MG versions of the extremely mediocre Maestro and Montego models were also produced, and even if the 2.0 turbocharged Maestro was no Golf GTi or 205 GTi rival, it had its advocates. The Metros were the most popular, however, with a surprising 142,000 produced. This success was no doubt helped by the exploits of the bonkers mid-engined, four-wheel drive MG 6R4 rally car; contended by Tony Pond in the Group B class of the WRC, it never managed to live up to its potential before the Group B class was terminated in 1987, though Pond remembers it as the best rally car he drove. A number of 6R4s were built for private customers, and surviving examples still compete today.
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| 1987 MG Metro Turbo |
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What MG really needed, however, was a new production sports car. The MG EX-E concept car unveiled at the 1985 Frankfurt Motor Show was one suggestion: built around an adhesive-bonded aluminium alloy frame, it had lightweight composite panels to form a streamlined, aerodynamic coupe body. It incorporated the four-wheel drive transmission and the 3.0 V6 engine of the 6R4, detuned for around 250 bhp… the show car featured digital instrumentation, credit card-operated door locks, memory settings for seats, mirrors and air conditioning plus auto-dimming mirrors, a projected head-up display and rain-sensing wipers - all items now commonplace in mainstream cars, but considered space-age in '85. It was styled by Gerry McGovern, who also worked on a prototype for a new Midget, and later, the MGF. The EX-E came to nothing, of course, even though in 1988, under the then government's privatisation programme, the Rover Group which included MG was sold to British Aerospace.
