STREAM W0RKS

This is an MG. Yes, really. Turns out it's got form in streamliners too...just ask Stirling Moss

“One hundred per cent this is an NG. It ties in with the production cars coming, it's not just a throwaway thing."

So says Carl Gotham, European advanced design director for Chinese megacorp SAIC, current custodian of ‘British’ MG. And he’s talking about the EXE181, an electric, perspex canopied, single-seat streamliner with more swoop than a flock of agitated starlings. It’s a mad thing, a knee high throwback to the golden age of concept cars when manufacturers would arm their motor show stands with bizarre 4,000bhp fever dreams powered by dark matter and constructed from nothing but alloy of unobtanium. But there really is history here, even if SAIC is mining a seam of MG gold that has very little to do with the company’s contemporary product. Mind you, Gotham is such an effortlessly charming and honest human – based at SAIC’s London design office in Marylebone – it does actually make sense.

Of a sort. But the modern design gambit really isn’t the current corporate ownership of MG, but some of the undiscovered country that is MG’s storied history. Back before electric MG4s and value driven transport, platform sharing and the complex web of industrial ownership, MG was a feisty, adventurous little business that very much aligned to the ‘because we can’ school of advancement. You can just imagine several fellas in brown Morris Garages shop coats standing around and making things for the hell of it.

That stuff goes way back to the 1920s and 1930s. From ‘Old Number One’ based on a Morris Cowley chassis that competed in the 1925 Land’s End Trial – a kind of on/off-road regulation rally – driven by MG founder Cecil Kimber himself, to supercharged K3 Magnettes of the 1930s raced by Tazio Nuvolari and later at Le Mans by Eccles and Martin. MG’s racing madness stretched from the Mille Miglia to the Monte Carlo rally, all the way to postwar TCs, and various other T-based alphabet cars.