I recently purchased a 2015 plus 4 it had only 3700 miles from new it came very well specified with power steering. When I first drove it I was a bit disappointed with the handling and stopping. The steering was very vague and for a car with power brakes they were very wooden. That was 3 weeks ago after stripping and cleaning the brakes changing the fluid they now are much better. A quick chat with wolf performance and fitting some reaction bars on the front and setting the toe in and camber as they suggested and the car is night and day better.
I've now got just under 1000 miles on it and was driving it around my home in North Wales today and it dawned on me just how good this car is I was keeping to the speed limits on A & B roads with lots of sweeping bends and I'm thinking why spend fortunes uprating the power and messing with the ecu. My daily driver has 3 times the power and so many driver aids but driving the Morgan makes me smile and enjoy driving just for the hell of it. I know some people want to add power mess about with the handling but if you accept the car for what it is and drive it as such its so much fun so I'm beginning to think morgan ownership is a state of mind. Following two heart attacks this car brings me peace and after I've been out in it I'm so relaxed and happy with what the factory gave me I'm just going to drive and enjoy I wonder how I managed without a morgan for so long
Brilliant post, Morgan ownership is definitely a state of mind.
Measured on any logical level a Morgan really makes no sense at all, however, measured on emotion they deliver in spades. Being honest with ourselves, we need to embrace the fact that a Morgan is a toy, it exists in our lives as an expensive unnecessary luxury that's there purely to give us pleasure, while I'm sure some people do use the cars as everyday transport for obvious reasons most don't.
I've always had some sort of hobby car in my life, and over all those years it's become increasingly clear to me you can't have character without imperfection, it's the foibles that separate the enthusiast car from our practical but mundane daily transport. If you iron out too many of the imperfections you run the risk of removing personality and charm, the very idiosyncratic qualities we chose to have a hobby car in the first place. For me this is the core debate that lies at the heart of the reto-mod movement, however, the truth is a modern trad chassis Morgan is just that, a professionally built resto-mod,.
Being honest if we really wanted 100% character we'd all be driving vintage cars, but we don't because for most owning a vintage car with all the challenges and impractically that comes with a car built in and for a different era of motoring, is a step too far. So we bought a Trad Morgan, which is essentially that vintage car with all the really challenging elements removed, in my opinion Morgan did a fantastic job of treading the line between an improved classic you can just use and enjoy, and that vintage car that's so chock full of charm and personality.
Taking all these a step further, while I 100% agree the starting point should always be making sure the car is as good as it can be in its standard form, we also need to accept there's plenty of scope to improve on how these great cars left the Morgan Works. Critically, any improvements need very careful consideration and skilled execution, having been down this road many times before with different hobby cars in my life it's all too easy to spoil the vehicle rather than improving it. However, if the owner is happy to just make sure their Morgan is in a perfect state of health as in theory it was when Morgan delivered to its first owner, then the John Wilcox theory of 'State of Mind' couldn't be more spot on.
I tend to take the slightly different approach of applying carefully researched and well considered enhancements, but that doesn't mean I'm turning my Morgan into some sort of modern luxury performance car, it's still 100% Trad Morgan which ultimately means it's still very much flawed so the 'State of Mind' theory still absolutely applies. It's just that my Morgan now handles and rides better than it did when it left the Works, and it's also a lot faster too, but critically it actually smoother and more refined to drive slowly which is the true measure of a successfully tuned road car.
If you do want to improve your Trad beyond what Morgan created then the starting point should most definitely be the suspension, I was fortunate to buy one of only six cars ever to receive the excellent Mulfab front wishbone conversion which transforms the front end, but it definitely exposed the limitations of the standard rear suspension setup. To fix that, I had Techniques Morgan fit a set of BBC ati-tramp rear springs replacing the absolutely dreadful rear springs Morgan fitted that were clearly never tempered correctly from day one, I paired the far superior Sheffield made springs with quality Bilstein dampers to control them, a set of lowering blocks, and to complete the upgrade a tried and tested Panhard rod to stop the axle lateral movement
In terms of performance enhancement, all I've actually done is help my 2.0 Duratec engine deliver its true potential, the potential the engine designer built in from day one. I wanted to release this potential without compromising drivability and engine flexibility, which I largely achieved by turning my back on throttle bodies and going with a proven inlet manifold that's known to help the engine breath more effectively everywhere but is especially good at increasing mid range torque,. The plastic inlet used on the Duratec Plus 4 was designed by Ford for a front wheel drive vehicle so it had to sit sandwiched between the engine and the rad, this significantly restricted what the designer would have liked to achieve if he wasn't faced with those packaging challenges. It's the same with the exhaust manifold, in both case with a Morgan (or Caterham) you have no such packaging challenges so it's almost a crime for anyone who understands engine breathing not to take advantage of all that space under the bonnet of the Morgan, afterall, Ford themselves would have done the same if they could have.
The rest is really about valve timing (cams), Ford ran little or no overlap on the stock cams for one reason only, to meet emissions, if they didn't have to meet such strict emissions regs for sure they would have fitted the Duratec with cam profiles very similar to the Newman Phase 2 cams I fitted, at the end of the day theses are really what I would describe as rather mild fast road cams and if you're not worried too much about CO at idle are again somewhat of a no-brainer. The ECU just brought all the elements together to make it work as a package and being plug-n-play it's a super non-invasive installation, indeed if I ever wanted to return to the Ford/Visteon ECU all I need to do is plug it back in which takes less than 10 minutes.
All in all it's a horses for courses situation, if you're happy with your Trad as it was when it left the Works then great, however, there's definitely scope to improve the car without losing any of its unique character, the suspension should be your first port of call and for the engine,if you exclude the emissions element, then like the suspension upgrades I've listed there are also zero compromises in letting the Duratec breath as nature intended.
I guess it's just a slightly different 'State of Mind'
