One of the key reasons I sold my modern 470 horsepower Aston Martin V8 Vantage and switched to a Trad chassis Morgan, was the wonderful combination of vintage aesthetics and engineering simplicity, combined with the modern efficiency, performance and tunability of a Ford Duratec engine mated to the excellent shifting Mazda five speed gearbox.
I have friends with Ferraris and Lamborghinis, lovely as these super cars are I just don't see my friends enjoying them as much as I enjoy my little Plus 4. The high cost of maintenance and the mileage anxiety that all these exotics seem to come with as standard are certainly barriers to enjoyment, but I think the biggest reason they don't use their cars as much as I drive my Morgan, is accessibility!
By accessibility I'm talking about the ability to just jump my diminutive Morgan and pop to the local pub on a sunny evening, or on a whim take me to a business meeting as an antidote to my modern screen and tech heavy company car. It seems my friends need to carefully plan every journey they take in their super cars, the roads they use are a significant consideration as their exotics are simply too wide to thread safely down most UK back roads.
This is a real shame as these type of roads typically offer the most driving pleasure, so my friends are forced onto the wider less interesting routes that are mostly crowded with traffic, and therefore frustrating to use. What I also see with my super car owning friends is they very rarely, if ever, actually use the full performance potential of their exotics. I found the same same issue with my Aston, to get a thrill from the thing I literally had to wring its neck, and this would always end in finding myself travelling at well over 100 mph risking the lives of other road users, and my licence.
Driving Monty the Morgan is the complete opposite, the handling and ride quality is very vintage indeed, but this means there's real excitement available from as little as 40 mph, especially when threading my narrow track open top Morgan down largely empty country lanes. As the roads open out I then find myself winding out Monty's tuned Duratec, and as the engine screams towards it's 7,250rpm rev limiter I'm literally laughing out loud as Monty hops and skips about but still somehow always manages to stay straight.
With the roof down and the sides screes off I'm placed right in the environment I'm interacting with, and when driven with enthusiasm Monty counterintuitively somehow still inspires confidence? Using the crude low tech powers of his wibble-wobble chassis and prehistoric rear suspension, Monty skilfully sprinkles the experience with just enough fear to raise my adrenalin levels nicely, and all this while mostly still remaining at legal speeds.
Then, when I take my super car owning friends on such a drive, they always end up laughing their c*cks off and commenting on just how much fun Monty is compared to their fleet of super wide and often overpowered exotics
The irony is after many years of chasing ever greater levels of horsepower and speed, I've finally learnt the less complex, smaller and lower powered car will quite simply deliver a lot more fun during 'real world' driving.
Perhaps I'm just getting old?
