Resurrection

A BLEAK START

As the 1990s dawned, things couldn’t have looked more bleak for the MG brand. In 1990, the MG Metro disappeared from showrooms in preparation for the reinvention of the Metro from Austin to Rover and the following year the octagon-badged Maestro and Montego would also disappear.

Who then would have predicted that by the end of the decade the MG badge would be flying high once again and the brand would be riding a wave of success which would carry it on past the sale and collapse of its parent company and even under new foreign ownership?

Despite the doom-laden predictions of industry pundits and marque enthusiasts, the famous badge wouldn’t lie dormant for long, but inspiration for its rebirth came not from Rover Group management or MG enthusiasts, but from the rather unlikely direction of Hiroshima, Japan: the home city of Mazda Motor Corporation.

Until 1989, Mazda had been something of a bit player in the European market, notorious mainly for its brave championing of the Wankel rotary engine in the RX-7 coupe, but otherwise known as a maker of competent if rather anonymous saloons.

That all changed with the development of the MX-5, a car which owed its very existence to the gap in the lucrative US car market left by the disappearance of the traditional British sports cars.

THE SEEDS OF RECOVERY

One can only imagine the fury at Longbridge when top brass realised that the Japanese roadster was now cleaning up in a market sector the firm had every historical right to consider its own.

In short order, the decision was taken that a new MG would be developed to counter the MX-5, but with the Abingdon MG facility having been axed a decade