The MG TF. It’s just an MGF without the Hydragas, right? Wrong. Very wrong in fact. The TF – its name reviving a badg first used in the 1950s – may have looked very similar to its predecessor but it was in reality significantly different under the skin. Sure, the rearengined configuration and indeed the K-Series powerplant and Metro-derived running gear remained, but in order to accommodate conventional steel coil springs, the bodyshell required substantial re-engineering.
Why the change to coil springs?
Well you can blame the famously poor showing of the Rover Metro (in Rover 100 guise) in the 1997 NCAP crash tests for that, since its one-star performance pretty much killed it stone-dead in the market, production ending in 1998. Since the Metro was by then the only volume-produced car using the Hydragas system, Dunlop called time on production of the displacer spheres.
The cost of producing them could no longer be justified for the tiny volumes represented by the MGF alone, which forced MG Rover’s hand in adopting a solution.
Developing a replacement car from the ground up would have been prohibitively costly for MG, by then without the might of BMW behind it, but there was just enough in the kitty to redesign the car around conventional suspension.
