GO BIG OR GO HOME

The British sports car offers classic style, hands-on sporting feel, and a full-bodied soundtrack almost no matter which you choose. Anything from a pokey MG Midget to a svelte Jaguar E-Type will deliver these qualities, in different amounts of course. Found somewhere in the middle are the MGC and TR6. They are both products of the 1960s, both genuinely sporting machines, and both enjoy the cultured tune of six-cylinders lined up under their bonnets. However, even if BLMC did find MG and Triumph too close to each other, these two are actually rather different. Not just were they borne of different circumstances, but they also have their own driving experiences.

The MGC arrived in 1967, itself a product of conglomeration with another sports car maker, Austin-Healey. The original idea had been, rather optimistically, to develop an entirely new Austin-Healey model along with a sister MG car, as per the Sprite and Midget relationship. It would conveniently use up the 4.0-litre Rolls-Royce engines for which the Austin Princess 4-Litre R had failed to generate enough volume demand. A by-product of the project would be to fit the MGB with a smaller six-cylinder engine, therefore fully rounding out the range. However, this idea of a new sports car was eventually kiboshed and, ultimately, only the six-cylinder MGC survived. Not that, as they discovered, this was such a simple task either.

Deciding exactly which engine wasn’t without some considerable thought. The