GOLDIE OPPORTUNITY

Purely by chance, one man became obsessed with record-breaker Goldie Gardner. Then his MG TC came up for sale...

- James Elliott

Thankfully the historical, romance and significance of the MG T-series is not what the business types call a 'barrier to entry! Despite all those GIs falling in love with them, their role in kick-starting racing in the US postwar, Steve McQueen and Denise McCluggage parking theirs nose-to-nose overnight in California when they were doing the naughties, starring roles in countless films and being a highly usable car for its era- yes, despite all that, you can still have one for tuppence.

In some ways it's a deceptively sophisticated little thing, too, though maybe not in the way the French might judge sophistication with their cutting-edge rolling laboratories, or the Italians as they kicked pre-war styling tropes into the long grass and went full-on for sharp suits and curves. In terms of a small sports car, accessible to a good portion of the population, and which had enough tech to make it FisherPrice easy to drive, in the immediate post-war years the MG TC was hard to beat.

Plus, perhaps above all, it embodied what MG did best until it was killed off - offer huge Labrador-like fun without enough power to scare the average driver or get them in trouble. All the sensations of sporting motoring with little of the risk. The A and B continued that trend; perhaps that explains why they also remain so undervalued.

The TA (a retrospective title applied only after the TB was introduced) came first, steelbodied and ash-framed and morphing out of the PB in 1936 but with wider track, 9in drums, synchro on the top two gears and a 1292cc OHV MG JG engine fed by twin SUs. At the same price as its predecessor (£222), 3000 were sold before the 1250cc XPAG-powered TB came on stream in 1939. Only a few hundred of those were made before the factory turned its attention to munitions.