For fear of turning a ground clearance thread into a tyre thread, it should be noted that because Morgans are occasional use hobby cars many of them cover very few miles, so the best advice would be for us all to go out to our garages now where our Morgans are sleeping and read the date on our tyres. For example, when I bought Monty just two years ago he only had 10,000 miles on the clock, knowing how light cars also tend to have very low tyre wear I thought I'd better check my tyre dates.
Unsurprisingly I discovered Monty was still wearing his original Yokohamas Morgan had fitted 12 years previously when Monty first left Pickersleigh Rd making them a good 6 years overdue replacement! This experience left me wondering just how many Morgans are out there running on very old tyres?
I spent a lot of time deciding on what I was going to replace those horrible age hardened Yokos with, in the end and after much research I evaluated the pros and cons of my refined list of best options, a process that suggested a set of 185/65 Continental Ecocontact 6s would be ideal. The new Contis did give a small increase in ground clearance of 7mm, however the increase was not great enough to blunt acceleration and if anything my speedo reading actually became more accurate.
The slightly smaller section also gave better steering feel and the softer sidewall delivered a significant improvement in ride quality, I'm under no illusion that any new tyres would have delivered significant improvements over those 12 year old hard as wood Yokos, but I remain convinced the softer sidewall 185/65 Continental Ecocontact 6s were the perfect choice for Monty who spends most of his time on the road, not track. Combine this with the new and properly tempered rear springs made by Owen Springs in Sheffield plus a set of quality Bilstein dampers from Dan White at SSL and Monty's ride and handling was completely transformed.
I should also point out at the same time a Panhard rod was fitted and the car was lowered by 20mm, so despite the 7mm I'd gained with the tyres, Monty's ground clearance was actually reduced by 13mm which doesnt sound like much but it proved to be enough to start giving issues on speed bumps etc. Clearly I needed to get back the 13mm I'd lost and return to Monty's standard ground clearance, but I didn't want to lose the lowered look and the relocation of the rear axle that finally put the rear wheels in the centre of the arches.
The solution came in removing the ridiculous bellhousing lip and reversing the lip on the chassis crossmember, this gained at least 25mm so actually resulted in roughly 12mm more ground clearance than a standard Plus 4, all this while retaining the lowered and centralised rear axle look. To be clear, I really didn't have a ground clearance issue with the standard car, and now Monty has 12mm advantage over stock any nasty scraping sounds I suffered after lowering the car are now a distant bad memory.
However, I've now proved my low point is the gearbox mount bolts so given how cheap and easy it is to do the countersunk fastener mod, I may as well take the further 10mm advantage, this should mean I end up with at least 22mm (let's call it an inch) more ground clearance than a standard Plus 4.
Happy with that
