MGC: THE ‘VERY NEARLY’ CAR
There are so many good reasons why the MGC should qualify for the sympathetic title of ‘the very nearly car’. Its short career included so many positives and but some key negatives. If BMC had been more profitable at the time, if British Leyland had not thrown all ideas of logical product planning away, if BMC had not made such a hash of developing the Austin 3-litre on which the MGC depended, if the engine had been lighter… need I go on?
If MG, John Thornley and Syd Enever could have had more influence on MG’s destiny, the story might have been different but other interests often managed to outmanoeuvre or simply outrank them.
The story of the MGC’s short and turbulent life effectively began in about 1963 although the basic idea had been floating around since the end of the 1950s. This was the period when Enever and Thornley started to think around the idea of grafting a six-cylinder engine into the forthcoming MGB, using the existing BMC C-series engine (as used in the Austin-Healey 100-Six/3000 of the day), though these were purely paper studies as no prototype was built.
