News : ‘As new’ MG Midget stars at Anglia

Keith Adams

MG Midget

This weekend’s sale at Anglia Car Auctions provided a stunning result for yet another timewarp discovery. The unregistered 1980 MG Midget with just 162 miles on the clock sold for an impressive £11,025 including premium. A new record for a standard, rubber bumper Midget?

The car was discovered by Anglia Car Auctions a few months ago – and adds to the mounting number of nominal mileage cars that keep turning up. The seller had bought the car brand new after hearing of the imminent demise of MG but never registered the vehicle as he intended to give the car to one of his young children on passing their driving test.

The car, in Vermillion Red, was sold unregistered and came with the original bill of sale, owner’s handbooks, and service manuals. Anglia had estimated the car would go for between £7000 and £9,000, so the final result was an excellent performance in an era where these unregistered cars are doing particularly well.

ACA owner Lyn George noted about the car’s history: ‘While at the main dealer, they discovered that the speedo would not read above 10mph. It was duly replaced and the speedometer now reads 19 miles giving a total mileage of 162.’

Wonder if the new owner will actually start using the Midget as intended?

 

Keith Adams
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10 Comments

  1. At £11k it is not bad value. The difficult decision is whether to use it or not. Adding miles will turn it into just another low mileage Midget, plenty of those about. Personally, I would detail it and drive a couple of hundred dry summer miles a year.
    Currently the most expensive Midget 1500 is a 1700 mile Inca example on sale with Nutley Sports & Prestige for£14995.

  2. I have a 1977 Midget on 33k miles. The previous owner, a friend of mine, bought it at 18k miles in 1987, and sold it to me in 2010 with 22k on the clock. I have used it in summer since then, but have now semi-retired it and bought a 2010 MG TF, as I don’t want to build up the miles too much. It will be on the Weaver Wander in July.

    MG Midgets must be the only classic cars that are still cheap to buy and run. Parts supply plentiful too.

  3. Does anyone have a spare piano.

    I regrettably owned one. Horrible excuse for a sports car. Strangled to 63bhp, Triumph 1500 engine prone to overheating in cramped engine bay, dodgy dampers and grip-free 145 section tyres on jacked up suspension. Rolls like a pig, accelerates like a slug. Did I mention the rust?

    A “classic” car I would never want to own again.

  4. Dear Mr Evans,

    Are you sure it was a Midget 1500? I had one and that wasn’t my experience.

    Andrew.

  5. Now, if someone did want to register this car would it not have to undergo whatever SVA (single vehicle approval) became and be a problem as it will not meet current requirements?

    My view though is that it should not be registered and the mileage not added to.

  6. ADO13

    Absolutely sure! Registration No. RCU780S. Currently listed on SORN and has been for many years after I sold it. Looked just like the one above — except it was black and had rust… and oil leaks… and dodgy dampers… and rust … and did I mention the rust?

  7. Though the following likely applies more to the larger MGB as well as the Morris Marina / Ital, when did telescopic front dampers and parabolic rear leaf springs first became a remedy for the suspension issues of the above cars?

    Additionally could the MG Midget / Austin-Healey Sprite or even the MGA itself have benefited from such an update had it appeared earlier at BMC?

  8. The aftermarket manufacturers certainly were producing telescopics by the mid to late 1990s, and the parabolics for the MGB followed soon after, perhaps about 1999. Frankly, like all these things , although the parabolics improved the ride of the MGB , there was nothing really wrong with the Armstrong dampers. The problems arose when they got old and people did not bother changing them because the low values of the cars did not justify the cost…. or sometimes they just did not bother topping them up with damper fluid ! ( It was a slightly messy job ) . It is strange how people sneer at old technology even though it was widely used , and successful, in its original era .

  9. The Morris Ital received the telescopic/parabolic arrangement when it first appeared in 1980, though could such an arrangement have been utilized as standard earlier on from the 1960s or before prior to the arrangement being superseded by a hydrolastic/hydragas or other possibly all-independent suspension layout?

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