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Posts Tagged “

MGB

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down on the street

1971 MGB-GT

Many, many cars have passed through my hands since I first picked up a '69 Toyota Corona for 50 bucks, but only a few really make me feel a twinge of regret when I think about letting them go. One such car is the British Racing Green '73 MGB-GT I owned for a few years in my early 20s; it was slow, handled like a garbage truck, went through $40 carburetor floats like other cars go through oil changes, and proved that all those Joe Lucas jokes are based on painful reality... but I still loved it. Perhaps this is the evil lure of the British Car, but I was finally able to heed the rule posted on a huge sign at the only British-car wrecking yard in Northern California: IF IT RUNS, SELL IT. This beat-to-hell MGB-GT, which could be a '71, '72, or '73, might be my old car, after a couple of decades of neglect. Sure, mine was pretty nice when I sold it, but a lot can happen in 20 years!
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9:00 AM on Thu Jun 5 2008
By Murilee Martin
2,059 views, 42 comments

Latest by n/a: My wife bought me an M3 two years ago, just so's I'd sell my MGs. (73 B & 74 BGT). Try as I might, I can't do it. To own one is to become an MG mechanic. Once more »

classic ad watch

Malaise? What Malaise? British Leyland Has Just What America Needs!

You'll have fun in the sun, "motoring tops-down" in a spiffy new late-70s MGB, TR6, or Spitfire. Note how the horrifyingly ugly bumpers of the Spitfire are barely glimpsed as we see happy Americans driving hundreds of yards with no apparent electrical malfunctions. Sure, British Leyland gave up on the idea of selling MGs and Triumphs in the US just a year or two after this ad, but can't you feel the optimism here?

11:00 AM on Mon Apr 28 2008
By Murilee Martin
1,885 views, 31 comments

Latest by Armand Bengle: @eastaboga: The Weber 32/36 DGV is a gift from heaven. more »

down on the street

1973 MGB

Not a whole lot of old British cars remain on the streets of Alameda. We've seen a few Morrises and a couple of Jaguars, but just a single MG up until today. I found this '73 MGB parked just a few doors down from the '68 Pontiac GTO and ran right home to get my camera, in case it was about to drive away any minute. As it turned out, this MG is a new resident, not a onetime visitor.
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9:20 AM on Tue Apr 15 2008
By Murilee Martin
1,941 views, 37 comments

Latest by Heffae: I had a 1980 MGB that was a daily driver love that car. But you are defiantly right about them raising the suspension a bit much when they went to the rubber bumpers. One time when the more »

choose your eternity

Project Car Hell: IRS-ized V8 MGB-GT or 1963 Studebaker Avanti?

The majority of voters felt that an eternity spent wrenching on a pair of Willys Station Wagons would be preferable to eternity spent with a '58 Pontiac/'62 Mercedes-Benz combo, according to last Friday's Choose Your Eternity poll. That's fine, but what if you'd prefer endless toil on a hopeless challenging fast car? Something with light weight, V8 power, and primitive 60s suspension and brake design, perhaps? The red-hot iron gates are opening- come on in!
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5:20 PM on Mon Apr 14 2008
By Murilee Martin
2,817 views, 49 comments

Latest by petersterncan: Picked the Avanti and didn't even have to think about it. more »

choose your eternity

PCH, British One-Two Punch Edition: Travellers or MGB-GTs?

Well, we can all go ahead and change our names to Ettore now, because the 'Bugatti' triumphed over the 'MG TD' in yesterday's Choose Your Eternity poll by a pretty healthy margin. Perhaps the faux MG wasn't really British enough, what with its German underpinnings (and the Fauxgatti, lacking any underpinnings, was undeniably the more hellish of the two choices). Still, the phony MG TD reminded us that there's just no Project Car Hell quite like British Project Car Hell; as William Gibson puts it in Pattern Recognition, you're dealing with the Mirror World when you start tearing up your knuckles on a car from the UK. A Mirror World in which electrons ignore the laws of physics and prefer insulators to conductors, every component containing iron manages to find a source of pure superheated oxygen for more rapid oxidation, and you develop an inexplicable craving for mushy peas after tearing all the skin from your knuckles out in the garage.
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5:30 PM on Wed Nov 28 2007
By Murilee Martin
1,752 views, 40 comments

Latest by FЯeeMan: It's a dead heat - 128 to 128. I don't have enough skin on my knuckles to break the tie. more »

interstate 5

Drive Oakland To The Grapevine, 1988 Style

Back in 1988, I hopped in my MGB-GT and headed south from Oakland, taking a photograph out the windshield every five miles until I got to the Grapevine, just north of Los Angeles. Yes, I worked a full-manual SLR while driving a twitchy sports car, and reloaded film while driving as well (thus losing the right to complain about people using their cellphones while driving). The idea was to load the shots in a pair of slide projectors, add weird soundtrack, and do some sort of installation art piece. I did the piece and, sadly, lost the slides during a move years later. However, I just ran across a long-forgotten videotape of the slideshow and was able to grab most of the images off it. All that remained was to dub the Murilee Arraiac song "This Is What He Is Saying" onto it and rollin' on I-5 like Dukakis in a tank!

1:45 PM on Mon Nov 12 2007
By Murilee Martin
2,241 views, 20 comments

Latest by FuzzyPlushroom: Holy crap, look at all those Escorts! You NEVER see those around these days (well, pre '91). I suppose that's good. more »

choose your eternity

Project Car Hell: V8 MGB or V8 914?

First of all, it looks like the Jalopnik readership feels I should pass on the '65 Falcon wagon in favor of the remote-twin-turbo Volvo wagon, though not by a huge margin. Food for thought, indeed; will keep youse informed. And let's not forget Friday's PCH Pimp Edition poll, in which we had our closest vote ever: at the time of this writing, the Bill Blass Lincoln leads the Cordoba 243 to 236! Looks like we'll need to do another Pimp Edition, to settle the issue once and for all. But enough about the past- now it's time to look at today's PCH contestants... More »

5:15 PM on Tue Sep 4 2007
By Murilee Martin
5,630 views, 60 comments

Latest by SVERIGE: Gee,I guess I would have to haul that bad ass 8 pot out of the 914 and get it runnin with a boxer 6. But first I would buy the MG and send it to the scrap heap, real quick. more »

interstate 5

Somewhere Between North Flynn Road and Westley

In addition to shooting 35mm black-and-white shots of my endlessly-repeated I-5 drives back in the late 80s, I did a lot of highway photography using thrift-store 126 and 110 cameras. I won't make y'all deal with the headache-inducing 110 stuff (or the even more maddening pinhole-camera shots), but here's a 126 Instamatic shot from the Altamont Pass area that's one of the few shots showing any part of my old MGB-GT. Yes, I know, it's not technically I-5, but it's spittin' distance.

2:30 PM on Tue Aug 21 2007
By Murilee Martin
605 views, 8 comments

Latest by johnnyangel: Fifth-generation Californian, San Francisco native, and 51-year resident here. I have *never* heard anyone use the "the" preface on freeway numbers unless they were an auslander. It's just plain wrong, not just parochially speaking but also grammatically so. After all, more »