The Big Resto
Rare Montego Turbo brought back from the brink.
As a car-mad Midlander, a love for Austin-rover and its many and various offshoots has been part of Michael’s DNA ever since he was a schoolboy. ‘These are the cars I grew up around and have always loved,’ he said. ‘I remember seeing the MG Montego as a young lad and thinking how cool it looked.’ The ultimate MG Montego is, of course, the Turbo. With lag that would put an early Saab 900 to shame and all-or-nothing acceleration that allows it to do 0-60mph in 7.3 seconds, the forced induction Monty was crude around the edges, but all the cooler for it. Sophisticated? No. Hilarious? Absolutely.
Michael had always wanted one, but by the time he was in his late thirties and able to consider buying and running one, they’d all disappeared. Indeed, according to howmanyleft.co.uk there are fewer than 10 Montego Turbos taxed and registered in the UK, so the chances of one
popping up in the classifieds was as unlikely as finding one buried in a hedge in rural France. Imagine Michael’s surprise, then, when that’s exactly where one turned up. Mike was tipped off about the car by a friend in the Maestro and Montego Club. The car was packed up for a family holiday in 2002, driven to France and somehow never came home, remaining there for the next 15 years.
Snap decision
When it popped up for sale, he didn’t have much time to think about it, so made a pretty quick decision, arranging for the car to be brought back to Britain using a specialist transport company. The first time he saw it was a few weeks later, when it arrived in Tamworth looking the worse for wear.
‘It was very, very rusty,’ he said. ‘I like to see the potential in any car. When you’re going through the entire restoration process, it’s important to be able to visualise what’s going to be at the end of it and have a view of what you’re going to see at the finish line. But all I could see was rust, even in the roof.’ Even so, Michael refused to be beaten and set about
‘It had rot in places you just would not expect, such as the middle of the roof’
stripping the Montego in his own suburban garage. He didn’t have much room to work with, but he managed to take the Montego apart piece-by-piece, carefully storing and labelling all the bits.
While he was taking it back to basics, Michael spent his evenings and weekend scouring auction sites, owner’s groups and autojumbles collecting as many new old-stock parts as he could to rebuild it with. ‘I managed to get most of the bits I needed thanks to patience and persistence,’ he said. ‘Even one of the rear quarters is new because the roof pillar had gone rusty. Much of the interior is new. I was lucky enough to find a new dashboard, while most of the switches are new, as is a lot of the exterior trim. I wanted it to be as good as it possibly could be and with that came a lot of time and investment in getting it right.’
In total, Michael spent over a year stripping the Montego back, with highs and lows along the way. On the plus side, he had a lot of knowledge in how to put it back together and had discovered that the car was mostly original and complete. On the negative side, he also found it was even rustier than he first thought. ‘I found rot everywhere I looked,’ he said.
‘In the obvious places such as the floors, arches and sills, but also in places you’d not expect a car to rot like the middle of the roof and inside the boot. It was a full rebuild that was needed and some of the repairs were beyond my own capabilities, but having got this far, I wasn’t going to give up that easily.’
Michael decided to contact local bodyshops to get some help with the worst of the repairs to the Montego’s metalwork and then paint it. But when
he showed them what they were
up against, the majority of them walked away, too scared to do the job. In the end, it was a car bodyshop called TT Mac, run by two enthusiastic and experienced body repairers, that took on the work – conveniently located within half a mile of Michael’s house. ‘They were absolutely brilliant,’ he said.
‘They didn’t mind the car being in the workshop for weeks and they were happy for me to keep my costs and their workload down by going down there to do the very last bits of the stripdown and some of the prep work myself.’
Not quickly, but properly
In the event, the Montego sat at TT Mac’s for almost a year, the agreement between Michael and the owners being that they could work on it ‘between jobs’ as he was in no urgent rush to get it back. ‘It was never about getting it done quickly,’ he said. ‘It was about getting it done properly.’ And if a proper job is what you want then you need look no further than the Flame Red finish of Michael’s Montego. The car is absolutely spotless, the bodywork is finished in a two-pack enamel that’s undoubtedly better than the paint it left the factory with, the panels having almost a mirror finish.
The car arrived back at Michael’s house as a rolling shell in late 2018 ready for him to reassemble, which is where the importance of labelling came in. ‘It’d been that long since the car had gone to the bodyshop that I’d never have remembered what everything was, where it went or the sequence in which it went together,’ he said.
‘But luckily, I’d kept a record and, in the event, the rebuild was a time-consuming, but quite logical process. The hardest bit was getting everything to line-up properly, and also being extra-careful to not damage any of the freshly repainted panels.’
Mike’s patience paid off, though, and by April 2019 the Montego was ready for its first MOT test since 2001, which it failed on headlamp aim and emissions, the former fixed by simple adjustment and the latter by virtue of some tweaking of the carb and an Italian tune-up. Finally, the Monty was back and raring to go, though the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic have meant Michael hasn’t had chance to enjoy it yet.
‘There were no shows, I didn’t have much work and then I got poorly myself, so I’m now desperate to start getting out there and to enjoy my car as much as I possibly can,’ he said. ‘I know how much hard work and dedication has gone into it and I can’t wait to enjoy it to the full.’