The Oldest and Newest MG Roadsters, Nose to Nose in Thornton-le-Dale

There are days when you take a classic car out with a plan, and days when the car writes its own. This was the second kind. WSU 141 — our TF1500 — was out enjoying a warm summer afternoon, and the destination was Thornton-le-Dale: the picture-postcard village on the edge of the North York Moors that is about as close to the spiritual home of Yorkshire classic motoring as you can get. This, after all, is Mathewsons country — the family auction house of Bangers & Cash fame has long been rooted hereabouts — and on a sunny day the place is thick with interesting metal.

I parked in the centre of the village, outside the well-known Wardill Bros, and went about the usual business of a T-Type owner: fielding admiring glances and answering questions about the year, the engine, and whether it's "the one off the telly". And then something happened that no amount of planning could have arranged.

Nobody could have planned it

A brand-new MG Cyberster — MG's electric roadster, and the newest two-seater the marque has built — rolled up and parked right alongside. For a moment there they sat: the oldest and the newest MG roadsters you could imagine, nose to nose, entirely by accident. I've staged plenty of photographs in my time; this one staged itself.

The Cyberster's owners came straight over, and it turned out they were as taken with the TF as I was intrigued by their Cyberster. Better still, they were no strangers to the old cars — they run an MG TC of their own. So we did what MG people do: stood in the sunshine and talked cars for a good long while, comparing notes across seventy years of the octagon.

Seventy years of MG in one parking space

The contrast could hardly be greater. The TF1500 is a hand-built Abingdon roadster with a 1,466cc XPEG four producing a little over sixty horsepower, positive earth, a fabric roof you wrestle with, and steering, gearbox and brakes that ask something of the driver at every moment. The Cyberster is a near-two-tonne, all-electric machine with something approaching five hundred horsepower in its most potent form, scissor doors, a wall of screens, and the ability to reach 62mph in a shade over three seconds without troubling a single spark plug.

And yet they belong to the same family. The Cyberster is the first two-seat MG convertible since the MGF and TF of the Rover era — which themselves traced a line back through the marque's roadster tradition to cars exactly like this one. Different centuries, and different engineering philosophies entirely, but the same badge and the same basic idea: a small, two-seat, open-topped MG built to be enjoyed.

It's the sort of encounter you simply don't get if the car lives under a cover. You get it by using the thing — by driving a seventy-year-old MG to a Yorkshire village on a sunny afternoon and seeing who turns up. On this occasion, it was the future.