The Plus 4 was perhaps the original sporting Morgan, and the model responsible for Morgan’s finest hour in motorsport to date, the now legendary TOK 258 scoring a class win at Le Mans in 1962.
Introduced at the Earl’s Court Motor Show in 1950, the idea behind the Plus 4 (plus for extra power), was to put a big torquey motor in a lightweight car. This idea is still the basis of the latest Plus 4s and it is a formula that is just as much fun now as it was then.
Our Morgan Plus 4s squeeze a modern 2.0 litre 145 bhp engine into a car weighing a mere 900 kgs or so, giving a power to weight ratio of over 160 bhp/tonne. Or to put it another way, better than that of a Mini Cooper S or VW Golf GTi !
From standstill, 100 km/h comes up in just over 7 secs and the car will push on to a top speed of nearly 200 km/h (where permitted).
But of course, the Morgan experience is not all about performance, it’s also about style. The Morgan’s unique blend of classic elegance and modern underpinnings mean that they are an easy car to master, leaving you free to enjoy the ride.
Driving a Morgan, in today’s air-conditioned, electronically surveyed world, is a refreshingly real experience. If you are looking for power-steering, ABS, ESP and traction control then you’d be advised to look elsewhere. Half the fun of a Morgan comes from what’s not included. The steering has real feel and the car is gloriously free of all the electronic gizmos that take the fun out of driving most modern cars.