MG Returns To Motor Racing
David Wilkins welcomes MG back to the world of motor racing.
9 Feb 2012, 12:30
MG6 Racer
A hastily convened press conference in Birmingham last week confirmed the news. MG, one of the UK's most famous car-making names, will return to motor racing by entering this year's British Touring Car Championship. But the MG that will take part in the BTCC is not the MG of old. It's a reborn, Chinese-owned company eager to re-establish a brand that's been absent from the market for over six years.
MG and the world of motor sport are natural companions but last week's announcement would still have been hard to imagine just a few years ago. MG Rover was abandoned by its former parent BMW in 2000 and then limped on under the leadership of the much criticised "Phoenix Four" group of managers before finally collapsing in 2005. The remains were picked up by a Chinese company, Nanjing Automobile, and a plan soon emerged under which production would restart in some form at MG Rover's Longbridge factory. But the process was delayed by several years, not least because Nanjing Automobile was itself taken over by another Chinese car-maker, Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation (SAIC), in the meantime.
Anyway, at long last, MG is back. Small-scale UK assembly of the MG6, a modern hatchback that's a little larger than the Volkswagen Golf, began last year, and the racing plans are the next stage in getting MG back onto car buyers' shopping lists. But the timings are tight - the first MG6 body shells to be used in the BTCC programme have only just been despatched to MG's partner, Triple Eight Race Engineering, which has to get the cars ready to go on display at a press event at Silverstone on 19 March and then to be raced for the first time at Brands Hatch on 1 April.
If that all seems a bit rushed, MG's choice of drivers and sponsors is more suggestive of long-term planning and serious intent. One of the new team's two cars will be driven by Jason Plato, presenter of Channel 5's Fifth Gear motoring programme and already, with 68 wins to his credit, the most successful BTCC driver ever. At the press conference, Plato held out the prospect of MG achieving some race wins this year before vying to secure the overall championship in 2013. He will be paired with Andy Neate, who combines his motor racing career with a day job as chief boffin at a high-tech lighting company.
And one of MG's main racing sponsors is a real heavyweight as well – Tesco, in the form of its Tesco Momentum premium petrol brand. For years, the supermarket chains have struggled with the perception that their fuels may not be as good as those offered by the big oil companies such as BP or Shell, but they have, in fact, often been innovators. Morrisons, for example, did more than any other supplier to promote the use of bioethanol-based E85, while Tesco's Momentum 99 has a higher octane rating than most of the oil majors' rival premium fuels. Although MG's racer won't actually run on Momentum 99 (fuels used by the cars are prescribed by the BTCC rule book) the project provides Tesco with a much needed opportunity to invest its petrol with a bit more glamour, all helped by 28 hours of coverage across various ITV channels for each race.
The other main sponsor, KX, is a seller of energy drinks, and the record of makers of perk-you-up potions in sponsoring motor racing teams couldn't be better; Red Bull is the team behind Formula 1 world champion Sebastian Vettel, so MG and KX will be very pleased if they are able to emulate that sort of success.
It's still hard to work out exactly what SAIC is up to with MG's UK activities but the launch of the BTCC programme suggests that it is serious about maintaining more than a mere token presence here, and a little more news about the company's future intentions away from the race track has been dribbling out too. The MG6 will get a diesel engine towards the end of this year, an essential move that will allow MG to be taken more seriously when it starts trying to sell cars in mainland Europe again, and two smaller models, the MG3 and MG5 are expected join the range as well. Will it all work? Nobody really knows, but after the disaster of 2005, the survival of MG in any form is a minor miracle.
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