BUYING GUIDE
After the MGB was put out to pasture in 1980, the famous MG badge had been kept alive with a series of hot Metros, Maestros and Montegos through the 1980s, but fans of the breed had almost written off any chance of the badge ever being used again on a true sports car with a folding roof. However, the MG RV8 was launched in 1992 at the British International Motor Show to change all that, even though it was produced in very limited numbers and was arguably something of a warmup act to test the water for the forthcoming MGF.
Interestingly, the idea for a new MG sports car hadn’t come from the Rover Group. Instead, this particular seed had been sown when British Motor Heritage started to remanufacture MGB bodyshells on resurrected tooling that had produced the originals. A bold idea by Heritage’s managing director, David Bishop, to look into the possibility of producing an updated version of the MGB was thought too complex for the company’s limited resources, and the project was eventually handed over to the Rover Group, BMH’s then parent group.
The Rover Group’s Gaydonbased Special Products division had been created in 1990 to look at projects like this, and the team quickly went to work modifying a Heritage bodyshell and squeezing a fuel-injected 3.9-litre Rover V8 into the engine bay. The result was the RV8, and British Motor Heritage was kept busy producing an average of 15 modified MGB shells a week at its Faringdon plant for the new car.
The bodyshells used torear wings, a restyled bonnet and moulded plastic bumpers.
