LESS IS MORE
The vee-twin Morgan will be no more later this year. We drive three-wheelers built nearly a century apart to discover how both offer truly unique driving excitement
Morgan had established an enviable reputation for building simple, frugal and practical three-wheelers with an impressive record of motor sport successes long before its first fourwheeled sports car appeared in 1936.
These vee-twin powered vehicles date back to 1909 and founder Henry Frederick Stanley (HFS) Morgan’s prototype tiller-steered cyclecar. Single-seaters with 4hp and 8hp engines first debuted at the Olympia Motor Show in 1910, the same year that HFS won the inaugural London-Exeter Trial, thereby demonstrating the car’s reliability. Everything from streamlined racers to four-seaters and even delivery vans followed.
Three-wheeled Morgans won grands prix, dominated reliability trials and set numerous records – notably, a Brooklands Morgan tuned by Harold Beart became the fastest nonsupercharged car under 1500cc over a flying kilometre in 1925, achieving 104.68mph.
It’s unsurprising, then, that Morgan decided to re-visit its three-wheeler concept to mark its centenary, culminating in the modern 3 Wheeler’s debut at the Geneva Motor Show in 2011. More than 2500 of these vee-twin cars have been hand-built at Morgan’s Malvern factory to date, though it’s been announced that production will soon end.
Morgan has assured its fans that the 3 Wheeler name will be revived at some point in the future, but make no mistake this is the end of an era – especially as it seems unlikely that a vee-twin will be used on any eventual successor.
This is the perfect excuse, then, for us to consider the classic credentials of the 21st Century three-wheeler, squeeze behind the wheel in the tiny cockpit and see just how faithfully it captured the qualities that made the giant-killing original such a success on road and on track.