In the early Fifties, the Nuffield Organization (Morris, MG, Wolseley, & Riley) merged with Austin to form British Motors Corporation. Like most other British car brands, MG had been suffering from a bit of postwar austerity. The classic T-type Midget was getting a bit vintage-looking in the early Fifties, with its narrow bonnet and open fenders.
Work began on a replacement and the new MGA was launched in 1955. The new car had a modern, fully-enclosed body with sleek lines. It retained the classic long hood & short deck proportions, which allowed the Austin-sourced overhead valve inline four to largely sit aft of the front axles.
While it could be had as a fixed-head coupe, the MGA was mostly sold in roadster form.
Allow me a side digression to point out here that it is a true roadster, with no permanently attached top. In fact, there aren't even any exterior door handles. There was a little pup tent sort of affair in the trunk, and if it started raining you could pull over beneath a convenient overpass and use this apparatus of sticks and canvas to divide the world into an exterior and a slightly less-damp interior. Roadsters are open cars intended for open-air motoring and while my BMW Z3 may say "Roadster" on the door sills, it's stolen valor.
At any rate, the initial MGAs were powered by a 1.5L (1,489cc) Austin 4-cylinder. For 1959, though, they received a displacement bump to 1.6L (1,588cc). Breathing through a pair of SU carbs and boasting an 8.3:1 compression ratio, the motor in the MGA 1600 put out 79.5 horsepower, which was a nearly ten percent bump over the earlier version and adequate to propel the little 2,000-pound roadster to an honest hundred miles per hour.
British magazine The Autocar managed a best zero-to-sixty run of 14.2 seconds and dispatched the standing quarter mile in 19.3 seconds.
The MGA 1600 is an interesting blend of features both modern... disc brakes up front! ...and archaic... the horn button is in the center of the dash?!? What's most modern about it, though, are those dashing good looks.
