Morgan SLR & Plus 4 Plus: Morgan Goes Modern…Almost

Across almost four decades, glimpsed fleetingly on the starting grid at a forgotten race track on a lazy summer afternoon, a race car waits in the heat.  Its polished alloy bodywork glints in the sun, a seeming protest against its obscurity even back then…

…when the car was already two decades old.  In 1963, when John Sprinzel and Chris Lawrence built this Morgan SLR (Sprinzel LawrenceTune Racing), leaving off the paint may have been a weight-saving measure.  It also worked pretty well as an attention-getting measure.  It got my attention, anyway, on that afternoon at Second Creek Raceway* all those years ago.

The SLR story began when racers John Sprinzel and Chris Lawrence were approached by Triumph racer Neil Dangerfield to make his TR4 more competitive in English club racing.  As the rules allowed new bodywork, Sprinzel and Lawrence decided to go with an aerodynamic coupe form, and approached Chris Spender and Charlie Williams at Williams & Pritchard to design and fabricate the shell.  Dangerfield was successful at racing that Triumph SLR, and it led Chris Lawrence, who'd already scored a class win at the 1962 Le Mans in a Morgan Plus 4 with stock bodywork, to apply the same formula to the slightly longer Morgan chassis (96-inch wheelbase) with its steel ladder frame and sliding-pillar front suspension. While the standard Plus 4 tourer featured front disc brakes and rear drums, Sprinzel and Lawrence chose 4-wheel discs.  Both Triumph and Morgan production cars used the same pushrod 4-cylinder TR4 engine back then, but Sprinzel and Lawrence modified the head and exhaust, raised the compression and added Weber carbs to get as much as 156 hp from 2.1 liters.  An SLR covered the 0 to 60 run in 6.1 seconds, and was timed topping out at 136 mph.  The photo below shows how far back the driver was placed in the chassis, and also the steep windshield angle, unusual on an English design in this era.

You might think that the Morgan factory adopted the SLR design and made a flotilla of them, judging by this picture of three SLRs lined up at a vintage race meeting...

But you'd be wrong.  Sprinzel and Lawrence made only 3 Morgan SLRs after that first Triumph SLR, which is pictured below. The smooth, aerodynamic design has been compared to the E-Type Jaguar as well as the Corvette Sting Ray from the same era.  The sharp crease that wraps around the tail recalls the latter, and the shape of the rear window and roofline the former...

The Morgan and Triumph SLRs have all survived, and have appeared together recently on the track. Triumph had its own independent road racing project, involving twin-cam engines, Italian bodies and chassis tuning by Conrero*, but the Morgan SLRs were the most modern Morgans to appear up until this time, despite or perhaps because of the fact  they were not an official Morgan factory effort.

Perhaps emboldened by the SLR design team's resolute attempt to drag their chassis further into the 20th century, Morgan management decided to modernize.  They went with a lightweight fiberglass body over the steel frame and plywood floor on the Plus 4 Plus, which appeared the year after the Sprinzel and Lawrence effort, in 1964. Weight was only 1,800 pounds, and top speed was about 5 mph higher than the square-rigged Plus 4 roadster with the same Triumph TR4 engine. The example below showed up at a vintage race in the 1980s.  This was a rare appearance, as the fixed-roof coupe was intended as a GT car...

But all appearances by the Plus 4 Plus were rare, as the factory in Malvern Link only managed to crank out 26 copies in 4 years.  Perhaps traditionalists were offended by this attempt at modernism, and modernists (people who liked the Lotus Elan, for example) thought it didn't go far enough. Styling was a tentative mix of traditional British (the tight, upright-looking roof, the grille shape and character line along the flanks) and modern if not trendy (the recessed tail panel).  Overall, the impression was clean, but as the British would say, neither fish nor fowl.

So Morgan went back to its traditional Plus 4 roadster with ash framing supporting traditional Thirties-era alloy panels on top of its steel ladder chassis, causing a bit of excitement when they installed the aluminum block Rover (née Buick) V8 in 1968. This Plus 8 sold well by Morgan standards, and stayed in production until 2004, overlapping the Aero 8 model which Morgan introduced in 2000. That's shown below. The Aero 8 was intended to be Morgan's idea of a modern car.  Modern in this case meant an aluminum chassis, four-wheel independent suspension, and a 4.4 liter BMW V8 with 6-speed Getrag transmission.  Perhaps fearing they'd suddenly found themselves in an unfamiliar century, the design team decided to have it both ways, with narrow cabin inset from traditional fenders, and a miniature version of the old Plus 4 grille, and modern compound headlights cribbed from VW's New Beetle staring at each other across a concave air intake.

Things did not improve at the rear, where the deck aero spoiler sits uncomfortably on top of rounded fender forms that could be from a late 40s Lea Francis or Alvis. Visually it was a comprehensive disaster, but dynamically, the car was supposed to be fun.  Perhaps as a result, over 270 of the Series 1 and Series 2 Aero 8 (the ones with the cross-eyed look) found buyers...

Meanwhile, the minions of Malvern Link were figuring out a more compelling way to connect with their past.  Morgan had made famous 3-wheelers from the beginning; the V-twin, air-cooled models ran from 1911 to 1939 and overlapped the Ford-powered side valve inline fours built from 1932 to 1952. Morgan's new old idea was to reintroduce their trike with a high-torque, 2-liter V-twin built by S & S. Disc brakes and roll bars were concessions to the 21st century, but the look, down to the exposed air-cooled engine and the narrow-gauge tires, could've passed for Edwardian.  Morgan Cars introduced their new 3-Wheeler to celebrate the firm's centenary, in 2011...

Five years later, Morgan showed a prototype of an electric 3-Wheeler.  Without an old-fashioned internal combustion engine cantilevered past the front axle, and with clever details like the toothlike brass cooling fins* and asymmetrical placement of the upper headlight, the EV3 managed to combine steampunk eccentricity with 21st century detailing in a way the Aero 8 had completely missed.  It's too bad, then, that no production EV3 ever appeared.  Morgan Cars announced early in 2020 that none would ever appear, due to the failure of the briefly-revived Frazer-Nash* concern to deliver power units.  Frazer-Nash Research, which had also promised hybrid power plants for their own namesake production car, went bankrupt in 2018, and parent company Kamkorp Group followed it into receivership in 2020, but not before sinking an effort to revive the Bristol make as well. For a time it appeared that all paths leading to failed British classic car revivals went through Frazer-Nash or Kamkorp.  Too bad, as the EV3 looked like lots of fun, and free of carbon guilt...

*Footnote:  The other cars we found racing at Second Creek in the early Eighties are pictured in "Lost Roadside Attraction: Vintage Road Racers at Second Creek, Colorado", posted May 21, 2021.  The styling of the Morgan Aero 8 was given a critical analysis in "Worst Car Designs Ever, Part 4: Final Finalists", posted August 11, 2016.  Virgilio Conrero's twin-cam Triumph Le Mans GT is pictured in "The Etceterini Files Part 12", posted November 28, 2017.  More recently, we told the story of the attempted revival of the Frazer-Nash in "Forgotten Classic Revival Follies Part 3: Frazer-Nash, the 3rd Time Around", from April 30, 2021.  The EV3's cooling fins, by the way, were supposed to be for the electric motor, but that was at the other end of the car, and we'd thought it was more often batteries that needed cooling.

Photo Credits:
Top:  the author

2nd:  motorhistory.tumblr.com

3rd:  flickr.com

4th & 6th:  gomog.com

5th:  rhclassic.co.uk

7th:  the author

8th:  wikimedia

9th & 10th:  bringatrailer.com

11th & bottom:  Morgan Cars