I've had an MGA too, Jim. I used to race it up and down the Great Highway in San Francisco before the local bureaucrats turned it into a promenade. Ironically, that is the place where we hold BurningVan. BV wouldn't have been possible with speed maniacs running up and down the highway. The MGA felt fast. Without the side curtains and the top down, you thought you were going 120mph. I'm fact you were probably as quick as a normally aspirated Vanagon Westy. The difference, of course, is the Vanagon would start reliably as long as you had a good ignition switch. ;-)

BenT
sent from my electronic leash

On Feb 2, 2012, at 4:38 AM, Jim Felder <jim.felder@gmail.com> wrote:
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> It took me a long time to figure it out (I did a frame-off restoration of an MGA in the early nineties that's still winning shows) but they suck. German cars don't, by and large, and Vanagons fit my needs, are easy to work on, and come with a great community to back them up. Though I had plenty of VWs (buses and bugs) it was a long time before it finally hit me that the German stuff was better made and better thought out. That MGA I restored: the year it was made, it was part of the third larges car company in the world. Just over ten years later, the marque was gone.
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