300-mile test The very fast Morgan Plus Six
Morgan puts a BMW straight six to great use in a modernre-invention of its timeless sports car template. Finally, then, is this the Morgan for you?
STARRING THE MORGAN PLUS SIX, MERCEDES AMG A45, AUDI Q7,
PORSCHE 718 BOXSTER SPYDER & BMW 3 SERIES HYBRID
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Of all its diverse berths, BMW’s straight-six feels more potent in this car than any other
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We turn left in the middle of nowhere, then right at the back of beyond, and by magical coincidence stumble upon a classic car rally. MG and Triumph owners’ heads whip round to rubberneck the Morgan. Their senses are very finely attuned to old-British-car spotting, and they know before they can see us that this isn’t an old car, nor an entirely British one. The smooth straight-six BMW engine may sound peculiar in a context of pushrod rattlers, and the lack of leaking hot oil may leave their nostrils under-employed, but their sixth sense correctly tells them they’ve been joined by a kindred spirit. An MGC owner recognises it as the new Plus Six immediately: he approves.
This brief encounter is an unplanned bonus extra dimension to a blissfully relaxed westerly meander from Morgan’s Worcestershire HQ into the Brecon Beacons and up through mid-Wales. Nowhere in particular is a great destination on a summer’s day, roof down, in a sports car. After leaving the factory in Malvern we’re soon zig-zagging along hedge-lined lanes, with one question in mind: how to judge the Plus Six? As a serious performance car, or as a leak-free classic?
Traditionally, it’s been easiest to think of Morgans as novelties. They’ve always been charming, and many of them have been very quick too, but they haven’t necessarily been the most well-resolved dynamically. But the Plus Six stands the best chance yet of being a Mog you’d buy for its substance as well as its style. Despite its old-as-the-Malvern-Hills appearance, this is the most well-rounded car yet to roll out of the Pickersleigh Road factory, with an all-new chassis and electronics. It even has central locking (and puddle lights under the doors). And a cracker of an engine: BMW’s straight-six B58 engine, as seen in the X7, Z4 M40i and the Toyota Supra, among others.
In this car its 335bhp feels more potent than ever. The Plus Six weighs 1075kg dry, and can snort and snarl its way from zero to 62mph in 4.2 seconds, quicker than the identically powered Z4 and Supra, but it feels faster still. Of its diverse applications, this is the most potent this engine has felt. And sounded. On
its standard exhaust the Plus Six sounds relatively demure, but with the optional sports exhaust fitted to the test car it’s really rather rude. If you accelerate hard, an eau-de-trackday aroma from the hard-working engine escapes through the uniform row of vents cut into the aluminium bonnet stretching ahead.
That evocative view is a big part of the Plus Six’s appeal, framed through its short upright screen with its three tiny wipers. Its central rear-view mirror, a thin oblong sliver, feels like it should be broadcasting in black and white. Ditto the round door mirrors, like pocket shaving mirrors. They turn out to have wicked blind spots.
After a brief spurt of dual carriageway we spear over the border into Wales, the hills morphing into mountains, the air swirling into the cabin becoming fresher and the trac a mix of dawdling English visitors and hard-charging locals. ⊲
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From the Plus Six’s cockpit, they all appear to be very high up; a supermini looks like an SUV from down here. Everything aboard is beautifully made, although it’s a shame about the offthe-peg steering wheel and jarring BMW-sourced gear selector. Creating bespoke versions would have been expensive, and the Plus Six was created on a tight budgetary leash (and completed before Morgan’s recent acquisition by investment group Investindustrial).
The gear selector denotes the sole transmission option; the eight-speed ZF that has become the B58 engine’s natural bedfellow. Morgan isn’t ruling out a manual, should great swathes of buyers demand it, but most customers prefer an auto. For now the Plus Six is auto-only, although you can override it with shift paddles mounted to the steering column surround. It’s a shame they’re plastic and rather ordinary-feeling, but there’s that pesky budget again. They do the job nicely regardless.
In its default mode the gearbox shifts up smoothly and comparatively early, which seems to do plenty for fuel consumption – we’ll travel nearly 200 miles before worrying about filling up. Nudge the lever to the left for Sport mode and downshifts become more extravagant, upshifts later and swifter. More so if you press the Sport Plus button on the centre console, which alters the throttle and gearshift maps but doesn’t muck about with the power steering.
The Plus Six doesn’t have any traction control – cause for celebration if you ask me – although it does have ABS. With all that torque on tap (369lb ft between 1600 and 4500rpm) the Plus Six’s proclivity is to leave a light smear of its bespoke Avon tyres on the road in its wake under acceleration. It’s well-behaved in the sunshine but you get the impression you’d have to be on your guard in the wet. It uses an open differential rather than a locking diff, chosen to help make it less intimidating on slippery roads, and for the most part it works extremely well.
That said, I’m initially finding it a dicult car to trust entirely. We push further and further into increasingly remote Welsh countryside to suss it out, the roads narrowing into slender capillaries and the vista expanding into spectacular valleys. There’s less immediate feedback through the controls, chassis and suspension than you might expect of a sports car. The feedback is there – it just takes a little longer to read it than some. That’s partly down to the electric power-assisted steering (Morgan’s own). It’s relatively slow-rated and not especially feelsome. The upside of that is remarkable stability either side of the straight-ahead. The steering doesn’t paw at cambers or feel nervous at speed. If you hit a bump, you’re not waiting to find out which way the car will go – it just takes it in its stride. That does wonders for fatigue on long journeys – this is a civilised, well-mannered car over distance. To an extent, you might wish it actually did writhe around in your hands a bit more on B-roads, but for high-speed stability and carrying momentum on uneven roads, it’s remarkably well resolved.
You sit close to the rear wheels, a little like you’re in a large, wide Caterham, and once you learn to trust it (and you really can), the Plus Six is truly benign, with a balance that appealingly tends far more towards oversteer than understeer. The suspension, by double wishbones all round, doesn’t quite give the ride quality you’d hope for. It doesn’t quite breathe with the road in the way a Lotus does, for example. There’s a slightly abrupt edge to the suspension movement, although it does become more comfortable as the miles increase, while always retaining a sports-car firmness.
Time for a breather, and to resurrect the roof for our overnight stop in Brecon. (On the scale of nought-to-fiddly, a Mazda MX-5 being zero and a Caterham being 10, it’s about a seven.) Next morning, air sharp and dewy, the hood stays up for the first part of the day’s journey. Beneath its cover the Plus Six feels really quite urbane. Admittedly, there’s a fair bit of wind noise against ⊲ You hear, feel and smell BMW’s straight-six working its magic
The Plus Six’s proclivity is to leave a light smear of its bespoke Avons in its wake under acceleration
the bluff screen and the canvas. The new, greatly improved air-conditioning system takes a little while to warm up. But later, roof down and the summer air turned heavy and languid, I’m intensely grateful for its cooling. Good news for the Plus Six’s hotter markets. Around 70 per cent of Plus Sixes will be sold abroad, half of them in Europe and the rest further afield, including the USA, Far East, Middle East and Australia. The comparatively low CO2 rating of 170g/km also opens doors to tax-heavy European markets previously unapproachable for Morgan, such as Austria, Holland and Denmark.
We’ve not quite made it that far, but we are now far beyond the Elan Valley, halfway to Snowdonia, phone signal long lost, tank nearly dry, skin lightly sunburned and Avons well-warmed. Serious sports car or CAMRA curio? The Plus Six treads a nimble path between the two camps. It has all the charm and charisma you’d hope of a Morgan while also being markedly more usable over long distances than its predecessors. It’s still hand-made using the traditional methods so important to the brand’s appeal – the chassis combines bonded aluminium with supplementary ash (to which the hand-beaten body panels are attached) – and it looks the part.
For the ultimate drive on a great road there are other sports cars you’d pick first (Alpine, Elise, Supra) – but the Plus Six has something they don’t. By the time we’ve returned to Malvern, it’s clear the Plus Six ploughs its own furrow, as a Morgan should, while getting close to those mainstream sports cars from a dynamic point of view. It’s the most sanitised Morgan yet but its increased civility hasn’t eroded its sense of occasion. Sidescreens and roof removed, vented bonnet ahead, fingertips tracing shapes in the airflow, it’s an experience unlike any other available today – from a car that sits more comfortably in the present day than any of its forebears ever did.
It’s the most sanitised Morgan yet but this hasn’t eroded the sense of occasion
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