MORGAN PLUS 8
HAS THIS QUINTESSENTIAL BRITISH SPORTS CAR SOLD ITS SOUL TO THE DEVIL
New Zealand’s version of the famous Malvern Hills factory is an unassuming unit on the side of an industrial block in Henderson, Auckland. Grand, it is not. In fact, it’s hard to find unless you know what you are looking for. Similarly, while Derek Atkinson is almost as iconic a figure among New Zealand Morganites as Charles Morgan is in the UK, there’s much less of the playboy about Derek, which probably gives him a stronger reputation overall.
Just as all Morgans have been through the gates at the Malvern factory, it’s almost certain that any Morgan restored in New Zealand has been through Derek’s hands. Derek gave up counting long ago, but he says that someone once totted up more than 50 Morgan projects, so the total will be well over 60 now, including a couple of well-used examples that Derek restored in his early days and that later needed a bit of a tidy-up.
Atkinson’s Restoration Service is not exclusively a Morgan shop. A couple of years back, Derek restored an Aston Martin DB 2/4. He knew that the car was slowly disintegrating in a barn and put the current owner on to it; the owner then commissioned Derek to restore the car. It featured in
New Zealand Classic Car Issue No. 292.
“It was appreciating faster than I could send him bills for the work, so he was very happy,” says Derek.
He’s currently doing a ground-up restoration, from the firewall forwards, of an E-type coupé. The front end is completely dismantled, down to the bare subframe. Derek has checked every nut, bolt, washer, rod, and bushing, and had all those in good condition replated. He’s scrubbed up and repainted all the brackets and plates. The parts cover two tables.
“There’s a lot of parts in an E-type engine bay,” Derek explains. “They are incredibly complex.”
A few more parts are drying in the paint booth, awaiting reassembly.
“You’ve got to be careful with your spanners. You can’t let anything slip,” he adds.
All manner of exotica pass through Derek’s workshop — which makes its anonymity a distinct advantage — for everything from bare-metal restorations through to mechanical overhauls and paint touch-ups. Derek has several concours winners to his credit.
Cheese, Vogel’s, Morgans
Derek’s love of Morgans began when a friend of his, Adrian Thomas, bought a four-seater 4/4. He used to take Derek and his girlfriend, Marie — now his wife and crew chief — out in it.
“Sunday afternoons, we’d have cheese on Vogel’s and go out for a drive,” Derek tells us.
Not long afterwards, the couple were at a party whose host, Marty Adams, was restoring a Morgan, but he was stuck at
refitting the mudguards. Derek went around the next day, worked out what to do, and helped Marty to finish the car, including painting it.
Then Marty took the car racing. Derek went along and remembers watching two E-types “going at it hammer and tongs”. He was hooked. Needless to say, Adrian and Marty are still hooked, and their roster includes an original three-wheeler and an Aero 8. All three remain firm friends.
Meanwhile, other classic car owners at those meetings spotted the Morgan’s particularly good paint job and soon a procession of Ferraris, Aston Martins, and Jaguars was heading Derek’s way.
Derek’s first Morgan was a Plus 4 that he took to a club gymkhana the weekend after he bought it. Club president Graham Kyle, famous for his handlebar moustache, won one event, Marty Adams another, and Derek the third; he can’t remember exactly which one — possibly the Indian rope trick.
“You drive around a pole holding a rope without letting it hit the ground …” he says.
Derek has had between eight and 10 Plus 8s over the years, doing them up to the point at which they have inevitably caught someone else’s eye. He’s currently between road-going Morgans, but there’s one rather special fixture in his workshop: the Plus 8 that he campaigned in classic racing from 1986 until he quit racing just a couple of years ago.
Derek got serious with it one winter, spending every weekend in the workshop putting his car on “a very serious diet”. Even more so than Lotuses, aluminium-bodied Morgans evoke the twin virtues of big power and light weight. After Derek added the space frame, it wasn’t easy to get weight back out, but, eventually, the Plus 8 weighed 27kg less than a standard car. Its highly modified quadweber-fuelled Rover V8 makes more than 373kw in a body weighing just 855kg when fully fuelled and ready to race. That’s a better power-to-weight ratio than a Bugatti Veyron.
“It’s all my own work,” says Derek. “There’s no imported tech in that car. I think about it when I go for a run — what’s the next thing I can do to the car to make it better? Then I go to the shop and do it.”
Derek fondly recalls charging down Pukekohe’s back straight at 160mph (257kph), tucked behind his aero screen, line abreast with Ray Williams and Bruce Manon, all daring one another to be the last to brake going into the hairpin.
“You just can’t find someone who can colour-match paint, roll an edge on some sheet metal, use a lathe, and then do some TIG welding. They are just not around”
“You’ve just cost me 20 grand!”
For 30 years, Derek’s Morgan was keeping Ferraris and Porsches honest in Sports and GT racing around North Island circuits. The honours would ebb and flow as Derek tweaked his car. More than once, he had another racer come up to him and complain “You’ve just cost me 20 grand!” after their latest dealing with Maranello or Stuttgart, or whatever other specialist tuner they had gone to to restore their edge over the 20-odd-year-old Morgan.
In the past, Derek has had staff working with him, but he now prefers to work alone.
“You just can’t find someone who can colour-match paint, roll an edge on some sheet metal, use a lathe, and then do some TIG welding. They are just not around,” he
The Plus 8 remains Derek’s favourite Morgan. “It’s the way it drives. The experience is unique in the motoring world,” he says
says. “I prefer to work at my own pace.”
You also need a healthy dose of imagination. A while ago, a customer brought in the remains of an old Morgan threewheeler that he wanted Derek to rebuild. Another Morgan enthusiast popped in to see it, and asked where it was. Derek pointed to what looked like a pile of firewood under the stairs. That was all that was left of the body, but it was enough for Derek to use as a pattern to create a whole new body frame in ash — it has to be ash, as it is both light and stable. He then built the body and mated it to the chassis and engine, which had been restored by the owner.
Peter Morgan’s Morgan
Derek has also restored one of the world’s most famous Morgans — the first production Plus 4. Originally a flat-radiator-model car, HUY982 was used extensively by works manager Jim Goodall and Charles Morgan’s dad, Peter Morgan, who steered the company through the era that wiped out most of the English auto industry. The car was campaigned extensively, and was part of Morgan’s winning teams in the 1951 RAC Rally and the 1961 6 Hours Relay Handicap race at Silverstone.
The Plus 4 was imported into New Zealand by a private collector in the mid ’90s and driven straight to Derek’s workshop for a ground-up restoration. Derek personally eye-matched its bright blue paint to the original.
The Plus 8 remains Derek’s favourite Morgan.
“It’s the way it drives. The experience is unique in the motoring world,” he says. “The torque is amazing, and, when you press on, it delivers big time.”
Other cars have a higher top speed, but Morgans, being light, can often out-brake them, and they feel just as fast at 40kph as at 140kph — “and they defy reason, the way they corner,” Derek adds.
Another great thing, he says, is that they bring out the best in everyone: “You just don’t get aggro; you get smiles and waves from people from all walks of life.”
New models
Today, Morgan is making more sophisticated cars such as the Aero 8 and its new LIFECAR, alongside the revived three-wheelers for those who think that four wheels is playing it too safe, but right in the middle — in the 4/4s, the Plus 4s, the Plus 8s, and their successors — is surely the secret of Morgan’s success. It’s a recipe that has proved the sweet spot for Britain’s longest lasting familyowned car company and its thousands of devoted fans, for most of its 110-year success story — and, for nearly half of that time, New Zealand’s Morgans have had the perfect custodian in Derek Atkinson.