HURRAH FOR MY FAVORITE car magazine celebrating my favorite sports car!
The June 2024 issue of Classic & Sports Car observes that “In the past five years, the Morgan Motor Company’s staple line-up has undergone its biggest technological shift in decades.” Indeed, I’d replace the word “decades” with “the marque’s 114-year-history,” an excellent summary given in the article’s 11 pages plus cover.
Frontispiece. Each C&SC opens with something of a classic frontispiece identified as “The Big Picture.” June 2024’s, most appropriately, shows Henry Frederick Stanley (“H.F.S.” to his mates) Morgan “competing in his own ‘works’ trials car, AB 2937, a Sporting Runabout, with wife Ruth on the Auto-Cycle Union’s rigorously officiated and hugely tough 1913 Six Days’ Reliability Trial.”
Image from C&SC, June 2024. I admire Ruth’s composed demeanor.
“After 783 miles of competition,” C&SC Editor Alastair Clements recounts, “the team was one of only two in the 1000cc Sidecars and Three-Wheeled Cyclecars class to bring home a Gold Medal.”
And, of course, trikes occupied the Malvern works full time until the appearance in 1936 of the Morgan 4/4, as in four each of cylinders and wheels. (Though not designated as such, all previous Morgans had been 2/3s, with motorcycle-derived twins driving single rear wheels.)
Don’t give up on Moggie trikes, though, because Morgan continued them in production into 1952. And then brought back the idea in 2011. Indeed, in gleaning tidbits from C&SC’s Moggie celebration, I focus on the Morgan Super Sports three-wheeler, 820 of which were constructed between 1933 and 1939.
My Trike Experiences. Spence Young, rest his soul, taught me how to pilot his Matchless-powered Super Sports.
Spence explains this and that of a Super Sports cockpit (and, yes, it’s a cozy one for two full-size folks).
Also, at a Pittsburgh Vintage Grand Prix, gracious owners of an F-Type (that is, Ford 1172-cc inline four-powered) let me enjoy piloting it around the paddock. Looking along its louvered bonnet, I was reminded of a 4/4—until I straddled a bump only to nail it with the rear wheel.
The Ford-powered Morgan F-Type, which continued in production into 1952.
C&SC’s 1935 Super Sports. C&SC Senior Contributor Simon Hucknall describes, “The driving position is better suited to those of compact build; even then the large, four-spoke wheel sits just inches from your chest, with a gaggle of levers and cables presented to confuse a Super Sports novice (such as me).”
I’m surely glad I had Spence’s instruction.
Tomorrow in Part 2, we’ll continued enjoying C&SC’s Morgan Celebration as well as savoring my own moggie endeavors. ds
© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2024