I came across this old post of mine from spring 2016 when I had recently taken delivery of my new ARP4 and thought an update might be of interest after 3 years and around 9000 miles.
First of all, unlike quite a lot of ARP4 owners, who moved on very quickly, I still own and regularly use the car, although admittedly only during spring, summer and autumn. I am simply not prepared to allow salt to start its' insidious damage, nor for the extra cleaning entailed in winter use, no matter how sublime a winters drive under cold but cloudless blue skies is.
Re-reading my initial post I note that I was quite unhappy about the rock hard suspension, this is now sorted with some new springs from Peter Ballard, who went to an awful lot of trouble for me, even driving down from the Cotswolds to Somerset to strip the original front springs out. He supplied springs better suited to road use, and once the front pillars had bedded in, the suspension is now quite acceptable, without any wallowing in the corners.
I have been busy personalising it, as any good Morgan owner would, I took off the removable steering wheel hub and 14" wheel, replacing it with a nice 13" Momo off my old Caterham CSR, I can now see the rev. counter so had no need of a set of Epitec change up lights. The wheel is now further away from my body allowing a more comfortable driving position and with the electric PAS steering, is well weighted at all speeds and perfect at parking speeds.
I am fairly short in the back, so raised the seat up a little, at the same time giving the squab a little more rake. Whilst on the subject of seats, I have always been a little peturbed by the uselessness of Morgan head restraints. I could not even get my head to make contact when fully bent back, so in the spirit of using as many Caterham parts as possible, I now have a Caterham head restraint, bent forward to be much more useful. The passenger seat has a nice foam roll, in matching velour, bought locally for a few pounds, which my wife finds does it for her.
Talking of wives, as it turns out, she really loves riding in it, though has not yet taken the plunge of driving. Now the suspension is more compliant and I have fitted a side exhaust exiting on the right hand side, from her POV it really works. Another success!
After much research, I have finally taken the plunge and fitted a combined oil pressure/temperature gauge in place of the clock, which I have now move to the left of the centre dash insert, in front of the passenger. Making a hole for it was a bit nerve wracking, but worked OK. Why Morgan see fit not to fit an oil pressure gauge on their modern cars is beyond me, though I expect there is a perfectly good commercial reason.
As far as performance is concerned, I complained about a lack of torque, this has improved marginally as the miles increase, but frankly is still a little disappointing. I am very tempted by Griffos turbo conversion, but if I go down that route I will probably destroy any residual value in having a rather special limited edition model, as half of the the 'specialness' is the Cosworth engine.
As a matter of interest, after a couple of thousand miles I thought it would be interesting to have a power run done to see exactly how many horses I was actually getting and was surprised and pleased that out of the advertised 225 bhp, the run showed I was actually getting 220bhp. Just not much torque, and as anyone who knows about engines will testify, it is torque that makes a car feel accelerative, especially for road used where it is not really practical to rev. the nuts off the engine to make progress.
There are a dozen other little 'improvement' I have made, but these will be familiar to all Morgan owners, so I won't go into them here.
To sum up, after 3 years, I am still in love and looking forward to getting out in her again in the spring.
