Crunch time for the Midget
Mike’s MG is left feeling exhausted after a dip in fortunes on a rogue road
1977 MG MIDGET 1500 Crunch! It’s a noise that no-one wants to hear when driving their cherished classic, but such was the fate that befell me, one sunny Sunday evening, when I decided to enjoy a top-down cruise in the Midget.
I didn’t get off to the most auspicious of starts; I’m still getting to know the roads around my new house, so I ended up crawling along a cracked and pitted single-track lane precisely 13 miles from the middle of nowhere, painfully aware of how low-slung the little MG is.
After one of the slowest and most clenched drives I’ve had in ages, I found an A-road and then took a left onto what looked like a quiet and recently resurfaced B-road that I reckoned would take me down to the banks of the River Welland. A quick pitstop to watch the sun go down, then back home for a cold beer. What could possibly go wrong? Plenty, as it happened.
Piloting the MG encourages a, shall we say, rather exuberant driving style, and this particular evening was no exception. Exiting a sharpish blind right-hand bend, then, I spotted the vicious-looking dip in the road a splitsecond too late to do anything about it. The Midget barrelled into it like a trawler diving into a North Sea swell, and – crunch.
I pulled into a layby with my heart in my boots, climbed out and peered at the front of the car, expecting the worst. I was amazed – not to say mightily relieved – to discover that the front number plate I thought had been smashed to pieces was intact and still attached, but wriggling beneath the car revealed an exhaust downpipe with a new and thoroughly unlovely dent in its lowest extremity. Convinced that the front suspension had taken a rather more terminal hit – and did that exhaust sound a bit fruitier than it had earlier? – I slunk off home feeling utterly dejected.
Fast forward a week or so, and I was attempting to deliver the Midget to long-suffering Midget fettler, Hall’s Garage in Morton. Then the usually slick gearshift first baulked, then crunched, then flatly refused to engage, leaving me stranded on the outskirts of Bourne with a boxful of neutrals. A quick peek into the clutch fluid reservoir revealed that it was drier than a Martini, so it was out with the emergency rations for the final limp to safety. Clearly, the crunch-related damage was worse than I thought.
After three anguished days spent imagining ruined suspension and a shattered gearbox, I received a call from Hall’s – and the news was unexpectedly good. There was nothing to be done about the dinged exhaust downpipe, short of replacing it, but the only other damage concerned a biffed front towing eye; the suspension – and, indeed, the gearbox – were fine. And the suddenly incontinent clutch reservoir turned out to be completely unrelated to the impact; it was just its time to succumb to old age. A new clutch slave cylinder saved the day.
The upside to all this is that the weather on the drive home was positively summer-like. And I’m now much more circumspect when giving it the beans on unfamiliar roads.