JustBritish

For the average car connoisseur, the only thing that will be familiar in this picture will be the grille design, and even that shouldn’t be familiar if you’re not at least 20, because the MG brand is…. well, let’s say a bit under-marketed.

The MG SV-R was supposed to be a sort of halo car to fill the bedroom walls of kids and empty the pockets of the gentlemen wanting a bit of ‘ugly but brutish’ in their driveway. With the chassis from another car you’ve never heard of, the Qvale Mangusta, and the 4.6-liter and 5-liter V8 engines from a Ford Mustang, this cocktail of all world was good for either 320 hp or 385 hp.

With strange looks and lack-luster performance figures, it’s no wonder that only 82 were ever sold, of which 42 were the SV-R version with 385 hp, like the one in the picture. However, that doesn’t mean that this particular one, which will go under the hammer early next month, isn’t worth your time.

Expected to fetch somewhere in the region of $55,000 (about €44,000), this example is a left-hand drive model that should make some lucky owner happy if he decided to buy it at the upcoming Silverstone Auctions on November 4, 2011.

It’s got lots of quills on the side, a badge few people will know outside Britain and track car looks, so there’s plenty of reasons to like it.

As reported by Bring A Trailer, an auction will be held on September 24th in New Cumberland, Pennsylvania that will liquidate the 5-acre property and British car collection of the former owner. It is rare to find such a sale that includes restored cars and vintage racers in what looks like pristine condition. They are shown parked in a finished display area with hardwood floors! Find more info and photos here via AuctionZip.com.

A brief (?!) inventory listing of the auction…. Cars – 1966 Austin Healey 3000, 1962 Triumph TR4 vintage race car w/race history, Land Rover Series IIA, Morris Minor 1000, 1979 CJ5 Jeep & P/A plow, off road ATV like new buggy, Areins 14 hp Hydrostatic garden tractor & cart; Lucas items; hundreds of  vintage oil cans & oil & gas station items; British car parts; grill badges & rally plates; collection of vintage British car toys & slot cars; original sales brochures (Triumph, Morgan, Sunbeam, Humber, Morris, HRG, MG, Lea Francis, Jaguar, Austin Healey, Austin etc.); restored 1950s Texaco gas pump; working traffic light; lighted Triumph Import car sign; Dunlop Tire signs; Castrol signs & items; glass oil bottles; car & gas station adv.; collection of vintage license plates; garage items; tool boxes & machinist & air tools; air compressor; British car counter stools; steel work bench;  British car memorabilia; British car books & shop manuals; owners manuals; Check Point Turbo Boost pin ball machine (car game); original dealership flags & banners; orig. factory MG-Rover coveralls from car line; adv. signs & thermometers (MG, Jaguar, Jeep etc.); tin British car signs; sets of tires & wheels (Triumph, MG,  Land Rover etc.); car prints & posters; British items; Ford 1930s wire wheels; British motorcycle items & literature; helmets & goggles; Atlas battery & Jaguar novelty radios; maps; jacket patches; British police hat; street signs; small household oil cans; Mobil drinking glasses; oil can banks; & other car related items too numerous to mention.

Anyone who knows more about this auction or attends it, please let us know the details!

RM Auctions, the world’s largest collector car auction house for quality automobiles, is now on the countdown to its inaugural sale at London’s Salon Privé luxury car show and Concours d’Elegance on 23rd June, 2011. The sale, which is only open to British-built automobiles, has attracted fifty-seven stunning examples of ‘Quintessentially English’ cars including some significant collections of Aston Martin, Jaguar and Rolls Royce automobiles.

Max Girardo, Managing Director, RM Europe says, “What is nice about this sale is that we have selected some genuinely rare and interesting cars and motorcycles while also offering a very comprehensive selection of British marques that represent a wide cross-section of some of the best loved and most keenly collected models.”

The star Rolls Royce lot is unquestionably the unique and historic 1926 Rolls-Royce Phantom I Experimental Sports Tourer, ‘10 EX’, the first prototype Phantom I Continental to be fitted with sports body ‘torpedo’ coachwork by Barker. This unusually rakish and sporting pre-war Rolls has a fascinating and well-documented history and is estimated to fetch between £400,000 – £800,000. It is fitting that in Rolls-Royce’s centenary year, the iconic British manufacturer is represented in the sale by a total of nine exquisite examples, ranging from an1924 Rolls-Royce 20 HP Open Tourer (Estimate: £60,000 – £85,000) to a late 1993 Rolls-Royce Corniche IV Cabriolet (Estimate: £58,000 – £70,000). Other Rolls’ highlights include a 1926 Rolls Royce Phantom I Tourer with coachwork by Smith & Waddington (Estimate: £100,000 – £140,000), once driven by Prince Michael of Kent during a visit to Australia, and a desirable 1932 Rolls-Royce Phantom II Continental Drophead Coupé, (Estimate: £380,000 – £420,000), one of just three produced with attractive Freestone & Webb coachwork.
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The last genuine MG works rally car is up for auction, 35 years after it was retired from action competitive farewell, and is expected to fetch £90,000-£130,000 (R1-1.5-million) – more than 100 times the price of the road-going MGB in 1964.

BRX 854B was one of two MGB rally cars built by BMC’s competition department in 1964, when the road car was priced at £850 (the equivalent of R1700 at the time).

It made its racing debut in the Spa-Sofia-Liege rally in August 1964 and went on to compete a further five times as a works entry, in the Tulip, Acropolis, Geneva, Danube and RAC rallies, all in 1965.

It was retired in 1975 and has since then had a meticulous restoration, overseen by MG historian John Baggott and legendary MG racer Barry Sidery-Smith with meticulous attention to detail. Existing parts have been painstakingly restored or replaced and some non-standard period competition parts have been sourced with no expense spared.

Its first public appearance after restoration was at the Le Mans Classic in 2008 and it has the historical technical passport, meaning it’s eligible for other such prestigious events, including the Goodwood Revival, Monaco Classic GP and other pre-65 invitation races.

The MGB will be offered up on June 2, complete with documentation – including letters from the British Motor Industry Heritage Trust and the BMC competition department – original handbooks, racing instructions, receipts, restoration archive photographs, magazine articles and newspaper clippings from 1964 and 1965.

A 1950 Aston Martin that raced twice at Le Mans sold for 550,000 pounds ($900,000) at an auction in London last night as demand contracted for other high-value classic cars.

The dark blue DB2 Team Car came fifth and third in the French 24-hour race in 1950 and 1951 respectively. It was offered with a low estimate of 250,000 pounds by RM Auctions, in association with Sotheby’s, at its annual “Automobiles of London” sale in Battersea Park.

The classic British racer had been owned by Aston Martin’s chairman David Brown, who coined the “DB” marque, and had been kept unrestored in the same private collection for the last 52 years.

“It was a strong price,” said Simon Kidston, a Geneva- based classic car adviser. “The purchase will give the buyer instant access to exclusive racing events like the Le Mans Classic,” Kidston said in an interview.

The sale raised a total of 10.9 million pounds with fees, with 81 percent of the cars successful, RM said. These figures include lots that were sold after the auction, such as a 1925 Alfa Romeo 6C 1750 GS that found a buyer later in the evening at 522,500 pounds, said RM. No figures were available for the number of lots left unsold at the end of the auction. The presale estimate for the event, which included 84 cars and 37 lots of memorabilia, was 10 million pounds.

A new record high price for an MG sold at auction was set earlier this month, when a a pre-war MG K3 Magnette sold for 231,000 pounds, or the equivalent of $372,000, at H&H’s auction in Buxton, England. It wrested the high-price crown from a 1935 Magnette Airline Coupe sold in 2007 for 199,037 pounds.

It would take a book to detail the convoluted history of this car; in fact, a book has been written. Magnette-ised: The Pedigree of MG K3015-2 from 1934 to 2007, written by the seller, details the many changes the car has been through in the decades of its existence. H&H themselves described it as “the antithesis of a ‘matching-numbers’ car,” although it possesses an unbroken history as a genuine K3. The car is sort of like grandpa’s axe; the original frame was replaced with an unnumbered frame supplied by the factory, as was the original 1,086cc straight-six engine, and the body was changed from two-seater to single-seater, and back again. Further complicating matters is that the car’s original chassis, discarded in the late 1930s, has since been built up as a complete car.

There have been some lively discussions about the car’s authenticity on the website of the Triple-M Register, but the car’s long and colorful history has never been in question. For more, see the H&H website.

From: Hemmings Motor News