In Morgan's Time Capsule, Everything New Is Old

[BMWDave]

By TED WEST
Published: May 15, 2005
LIME ROCK, Conn.

MAURICE CHEVALIER never gets old. Claudette Colbert never gets old. But a Morgan is born old.

Yes, yes, it's a terrible thing to say about a brand-new sports car, and the Morgan Aero 8 Mk. II is as brand new as Morgans get. But you must understand, at Malvern Link in Worcestershire, England, "old" is a good thing. It evokes hand-built craftsmanship, well-considered tradition, the sorely missed integrity of vanished generations.

Accordingly, Morgans are profoundly hand-built, using methods and tools dating from the 1930's. Wrinkle your Morgan's fender and, as with 18th-century firearms, the replacement part must be hand-fitted to your wounded darling.

But this will never do, you say.

Evidently, it will. Such Victorian iconoclasm has been doing, and doing nicely, since 1909. That was when Henry Frederick Stanley Morgan (H. F. S., to you) began a long career of doing it wrong - standing resolutely outside the conventional wisdom. His first vehicle was intended to be a motorcycle, but before he was done it had three wheels. Not incidentally, it also had one of the first independent suspensions.

For 27 succeeding years, until the Morgan Four Four roadster of 1936, H. F. S. refused to build anything with four wheels. Why should he? Initially robust sales of three-wheelers had allowed him to drive a nice four-wheeler - a Rolls-Royce. All the while, Britons' admiration for sheer daftness rendered the late-1920's Morgan Super Sport three-wheeler one of the most chic of racing devices. Then came World War II and its rude realism. H. F. S. conceded that the future had four wheels on it, and that was that.

Ah, but Malvern Link persists in doing things as it pleases. How so, you may ask. What happens when a small self-consumed firm like this is grabbed around the windpipe and made to pay attention to 21st-century reality?

Not much. The new Aero 8 Mk. II, moderately different from the Mk. I that was never imported to the United States, only recently received federal certification; there are only about a dozen in the country. The car remains defiantly a Morgan. It has four wheels, granted, and a convertible top that may be said to snub the elements. But valiantly traditional, it continues to disdain the use of its own engines. Morgans have never had homemade motors, borrowing JAP motorcycle engines, Anzani aircraft engines, Coventry Climax pump motors and automotive power plants from Standard, Triumph, Fiat and more.

The Aero 8 Mk. II, as it happens, uses a splendid six-speed manual gearbox mated to a ruthlessly modern, pruriently potent BMW 4.4-liter V-8 of 325 horsepower and 330 pound-feet of torque. If you don't know, that's plenty.

The combination gets to 60 miles an hour in less time than it takes to speed-dial Malvern Link. In testing by Road & Track magazine, the car skittered from naught to 60 miles an hour in 4.5 seconds.

Just as predictably, this Morgan, heir to England's tradition of "light cars" (small sporty roadsters used for rallies and trials competitions) has the virtue of being breathlessly light. The entire chassis is aluminum. All up, the Aero 8 weighs a feathery 2,500 pounds. If you're wondering why a 3,800-pound BMW 5 Series, using the same V-8, can't match the Aero 8's blistering acceleration, you're not paying attention.

Derived from a racecar prototype built some years ago, the all-aluminum Aero 8 chassis is stupendously sturdy. One challenge of building a competent open car is to eliminate "cowl shake" (when the windshield does the funky chicken every time you cross railroad tracks). Like real men, the Aero 8's cowl doesn't dance. Period.

The sturdy structure also helps the suspension do its work. The positively girder-like Aero 8 suspension parts - latter-day incarnations of H. F. S.'s prototype 1909 independent suspension - make the car as appallingly sure-footed around corners as it is fast in a straight line.

Finally, its emphatic brakes, six pistons in front and two in back, will tear holes in asphalt. In all but name, this is a supercar.

But this is getting confusing. How can the Aero 8 be an old-fashioned supercar? Isn't that cheating?

Of course. What's more, if ever there were a car to break all the rules, a car perfectly suited to the ideal unplanned weekend in the Hamptons, it's the Aero 8 Mk. II. To begin, there is room for only one other occupant. Good so far.

There is just enough trunk for six bathing suits and a hair dryer. Better.

When I picked up the car from Morgan Motors of New England in Copake, N.Y. (www.morgan-spares.com), I learned it sells for $120,000. Case closed.

After all, what kind of perfect unplanned Hamptons weekend can you have in a $12,000 Korean station wagon? Add one zero, and you're a star.

Let's clear up one additional point. The misperception persists (I entertained it for decades) that all Morgans use wood in their chassis. Pish-tosh. True, tradition dictates the lavish use of fine ash to mount body pieces to the all-metal chassis. It worked in 1909. Don't fix it.

But not all of the Aero 8's wood is invisible. Its cockpit features beautiful straight-grain ash, another genuflection to tradition. Vintage road testers in the 1950's loved to lather over how a proper sports car "cosseted" its occupants. The Aero 8 does that. They gushed over precise rack-and-pinion steering and how the gearshift "falls readily to hand." The Aero 8 has that, does that.

The leather bucket seats are hardly bucketlike, with excellent lateral support should you happen on a speedy corner. They have no backrest adjustment for the best of reasons: the backrest is already perfect.

In fact, the only seating adjustment at all is fore and aft, which caused a problem. If you have average arms and average legs - I do; want to make something of it? - you'll either be a little too far from the pedals or a little too close to the wheel. I settled on the latter and got used to it. Why not? The genetics of Morgan dictate a goodly amount of "getting used to." Fail to do so, and, well, you're just "not our sort."

From the year dot, English enthusiast cars have tugged at our collective elbow, making us pay attention. The Aero 8's external mirrors drooped, for instance, though Larry Eckler, president of Morgan Motors of New England, said they could be repositioned to correct the problem.

The knob on top of the "quick release" parking brake came unscrewed after only a few uses. It was easily reattached, and once paid attention to, behaved itself. The compact, nicely lined convertible top didn't want to latch the first couple of times - but a well-placed thump here, and one there, set things right. Morgans are still Morgans, each handsomely furnished with English-roadster "character." Huzzah.

The Aero 8 makes a profound visual statement. Its long, swoopy lines and teardrop shape are unlike anything seen since Anthony Eden was prime minister. The same goes for the headlights.

Headlights? Yes. On a dark-colored body, the Aero 8's headlights, mounted on the inward face of the front fenders, look positively cross-eyed. The light color of my silver test car mitigated things somewhat, but its eyes still looked like a flounder's, situated oddly and gawking in curious directions.

No matter. During our touring, people in snaggle-toothed rusty pickup trucks gave us the thumbs-up usually reserved for custom Harleys. (With the special side-exit exhausts of the test car, we sounded vaguely Harleylike.)

Along the main streets of the Northeast, kindergarten teachers, sensible-shoed insurance salesmen and mild-mannered pharmacists all gaped, then flashed big smiles and waves. Arriving at my destination, the legendary Lime Rock Park road-racing circuit in northwest Connecticut, the car drew fans the way a honeycomb attracts bears.

A scrum of Skip Barber Racing School students, fresh from their day's instruction, poked and prodded and looked back at the headlights cross-eyed. They were altogether amused. More to the point, after several moderately fast laps on the track, I was convinced. This unusual car speaks performance fluently.

If you are suffering from intimations of insignificance, an Aero 8 may change your life. Owners are destined to live like George Bailey during the last five minutes of "It's A Wonderful Life." Suddenly, you're everyone's favorite everything.

One knotty issue remains: Is this just another profligate, yahoo-powered contributor to bad air and warm Decembers?

Yes. Also, no. If you love the full-throttle V-8 soundtrack, an Aero 8, like any high-performance car, can pump stupendous quantities of refined goods out the pipe. Yet measured by the E.P.A., this same muscle-y Morgan gets respectable mileage of 16.31 in town and 29.77 on the highway. See? It's up to you.

INSIDE TRACK: The world's most modern between-the-wars roadster.

[giant_mtb]

I love that car...and I don't know why.    

[BMWDave]

I love that car...and I don't know why.  

Maybe cause it looks so nice.

[giant_mtb]

I love that car...and I don't know why. 

Maybe cause it looks so nice.

Yeah...it deffinitely is one heck of a beautiful car.  That pic is the first time I've seen it look "cross-eyed", because of the angle of the shot.  I usually don't notice its "cross-eye"ness in other pics.  It also depends on how you look at it. lol

[BMWDave]

I love that car...and I don't know why.?

Maybe cause it looks so nice.

Yeah...it deffinitely is one heck of a beautiful car.  That pic is the first time I've seen it look "cross-eyed", because of the angle of the shot.  I usually don't notice its "cross-eye"ness in other pics.  It also depends on how you look at it. lol

If you look at it head on, it looks fine.  If you look at it from the side, it looks cross eyed a bit.

[BMWDave]

Like that.

[giant_mtb]

Yeah.  It looks like the two headlights are different sizes!  lol I dunno I just thought it was funny.     :P  

[Run Away]

I really don't see why they didn't just move the headlights out a bit or made some better housings so they didn't look cross-eyed. Other than the lights I love the look of the car.

[280Z Turbo]

I really don't see why they didn't just move the headlights out a bit or made some better housings so they didn't look cross-eyed. Other than the lights I love the look of the car.

Yeah, why would they make a car literally look retarded?! I wish they would change the lights.

[Fire It Up]

It looks like a British psycho murderer.

[Laconian]

The lights are [truthfully] from a New Beetle, and they bother me.

[BMWDave]

The lights are [truthfully] from a New Beetle, and they bother me.

Where did you find that out?  It would be insane for them to use such a low mainstream car's headlights on their exotic.

[TBR]

The lights are [truthfully] from a New Beetle, and they bother me.

Where did you find that out?  It would be insane for them to use such a low mainstream car's headlights on their exotic.

Probably from R&T's review. And the reason is quite simple, Morgan can't afford to have stuff like that specially made (that is the same reason it shares a lot of switch gear with BMWs) and there aren't exactly a lot of cars on the market with almost perfectly round headlights.

[BMWDave]

The lights are [truthfully] from a New Beetle, and they bother me.

Where did you find that out?  It would be insane for them to use such a low mainstream car's headlights on their exotic.

Probably from R&T's review. And the reason is quite simple, Morgan can't afford to have stuff like that specially made (that is the same reason it shares a lot of switch gear with BMWs) and there aren't exactly a lot of cars on the market with almost perfectly round headlights.

Well, they have only to looks to BMW's mini for round headlights.

[TBR]

The lights are [truthfully] from a New Beetle, and they bother me.

Where did you find that out?  It would be insane for them to use such a low mainstream car's headlights on their exotic.

Probably from R&T's review. And the reason is quite simple, Morgan can't afford to have stuff like that specially made (that is the same reason it shares a lot of switch gear with BMWs) and there aren't exactly a lot of cars on the market with almost perfectly round headlights.

Well, they have only to looks to BMW's mini for round headlights.

The Mini wasn't out when the Aero was realized in Europe.

[BMWDave]

The lights are [truthfully] from a New Beetle, and they bother me.

Where did you find that out?  It would be insane for them to use such a low mainstream car's headlights on their exotic.

Probably from R&T's review. And the reason is quite simple, Morgan can't afford to have stuff like that specially made (that is the same reason it shares a lot of switch gear with BMWs) and there aren't exactly a lot of cars on the market with almost perfectly round headlights.

Well, they have only to looks to BMW's mini for round headlights.

The Mini wasn't out when the Aero was realized in Europe.

Oh-I didnt realize that.

[Raza]

I want one.  I have for years.

[BMWDave]

I want one.  I have for years.

Even if you still want one in 10 years, the styling will still be fresh...its a beautiful design.