Background
The MGA which was launched at the 1955 Frankfurt Motor Show, earned its “A” nomenclature to signify it being the “first of a new line” as MG put it. It would have been every bit as apt, as we shall see, however if the “A” had stood for “America.”
In the post-World War II era America wasn’t just the land of the free, it was also the home of thousands upon thousands of returning service personnel. Many of these had been posted in the UK and returned home with fond and abiding memories of all things British. For many these included those cutesy little British pre-war sports cars. This nostalgia helped fuel US demand for the first post-war MG, the TC “Midget,” even though it was only ever produced in right hand drive. When the TD ambled along in 1950, MG had shrewdly added a factory left hand drive version to the books. This proved a tipping point for MG and ultimately nearly 23,000 of the 30,000 TDs made ended up in North America.
A TF model followed but was a half-heated affair with the company’s focus on the necessity of a merger of the M.G. Car Company with the Austin Motor Company and Morris to form the British Motor Corporation (BMC). Other domestic headwinds were battering MG, too. The unforeseen arrival of the Austin Healey 100/4 in 1952 didn’t help MG’s prospects of a modern follow-up to the pre-war derived T-Types one bit.
Luckily, however, US sales of the TF hit a wall in 1953 by which point most Americans had realised it was essentially a mid-1930’s design with a 1950’s price tag. BMC were now forced into “something must be done” territory. That something was to take the Le Mans proven EX 182 prototype racers as the basis for the all, or mostly, new MGA. And so, the MGA really did signify the “first of a new line” after all, looking and performing nothing like the ageing T-Type cars it replaced. If the name of the game was to conquer the North American market, which it was, then the MGA was a bona fide champion. Of the 101,000 produced by the end of its life in 1962, around 95,000 were exported with the vast majority of those ending up on the North American continent.
By 1958 a high performance “Twin-Cam” version had been added to the range. This used a version of the same B-Series motor as the standard car but with double overhead camshafts and an aluminium head. Capacity had also increased by around 100cc to 1,588cc. The jump in power was significant, going from around 72bhp to nearly 108bhp. It proved a little too spicey in reality with the compression ratio later dropping down to 8.3:1 from 9.9:1 to help promote reliability with lower octane fuels. This was still sufficient for over 100bhp, however. A shade over 2,000 Twin-Cams were built over a brief two-year production life.
