Mud, Le Mans and Specials: The Competition History of the MG T-Series

The T-Series was never just a road car. Works TAs won mud-soaked trials championships in brown-and-cream paint; TCs launched American road racing; home-built specials beat far more exotic machinery; and a photographer's rebodied TD at Le Mans became the blueprint for the MGA. Two men who started in MGs later beat Ferrari at Le Mans.

The mud-plugging years, 1936 to 1939

In 1930s Britain, motor racing on a proper circuit was expensive and the circuits themselves were few. What ordinary sporting drivers had instead was the trial — cheap, popular, gloriously daft, and known unaffectionately as "mud-plugging". The object was to climb the steepest, filthiest, most impossible hill in the country without stopping, or, failing that, further than the next man. Singer, Triumph, Riley and MG all fielded works-supported teams, and those teams adopted the deliberately jocular names of the age.

MG's first team, formed in 1934 by Maurice Toulmin, R A MacDermid and Jack Bostock, were painted in works brown over cream. They were, inevitably, the Cream Crackers. They ran P-types to begin with, moved to supercharged PBs in 1936, and switched to TAs for the 1937 season.

Their great rivals inside the MG stable were the Three Musketeers, a matching team painted red from 1937, with each car individually named after Dumas's characters. One surviving Musketeer TA — registration ABL 961 — was Athos, and it is still known in trials circles today. In Scotland, Abingdon's other representatives raced as the Highlanders and the Blue Bustards.

The results made the newspapers of the day. At the 1935 Exeter Trial, the Crackers and Musketeers tied for the team prize. In 1936 the Musketeers took the MCC Team Championship outright. In 1937, with both teams fielding six TAs apiece — Ken Crawford prominent among the Crackers — it was the Cream Crackers who took the MCC crown. In 1938, with bored-out VA engines fitted for a little more shove, they took it again. 1938 was their final season.

Cecil Kimber, MG's founding force, believed in what he called "win on Sunday, sell on Monday", and the TA's healthy sales owed a great deal to the Cream Cracker headlines. It is only honest to record that not every enthusiast was happy with the machinery beneath those headlines: contemporary critics grumbled that MG's exquisite overhead-cam engines had been shelved in favour of "rather ordinary" pushrod Morris units in the name of rationalisation, and the argument, in fainter form, has never entirely stopped.

The T-Series also went further afield than mud. In 1939 Allan Tomlinson won the handicap classification of the Australian Grand Prix driving an MG TA — a serious result on a serious international stage.

The TC and the American explosion, 1945 to 1955

The story of how the TC reached America is told properly in Abingdon to America: the MG T-Series story. Here the point is what happened once it was there.

The Sports Car Club of America had been founded in 1944 and began sanctioning full road races in 1948. At the inaugural Watkins Glen Grand Prix that year, eight of just fifteen starters were MG TCs. All eight finished. The following year eighteen TCs lined up in a field of forty-three in front of a crowd of about 50,000. By 1950 attendance had passed 100,000. By 1951 it was over 200,000.

The plain fact is that, for several years, American road racing was substantially an MG formula. The class it created — small, cheap, driveable, tunable — was still what most of the country was racing five years later.

They started in MGs

The T-Series was also a training ground, and the roll-call of drivers who cut their teeth on one reads like a short history of post-war American motor sport.

• Carroll Shelby made his racing debut in May 1952 in an MG TC. He won his first race that day, was entitled to a second on the same programme, and later — driving the same little TC — beat bigger, faster Jaguars. Shelby himself later reflected that although he still had a great deal to learn, he already knew how to go fast; the MG, he said, changed his life, because from that afternoon he knew he wanted a career in racing and sports cars.
• Ken Miles, of whom much more below.
• Phil Hill, who would become America's first Formula One World Champion.
• John Fitch, Bill Milliken, Dick Thompson, John von Neumann — the working core of American sports-car racing in the 1950s.
• Steve McQueen, whose competition life began, quietly, in an MG.

The published lists of American drivers whose first race was in an MG run to some eighty names. And here is the line the whole section has been building towards: the two men at the heart of Ford's 1966 Le Mans victory over Ferrari — Carroll Shelby, who by then ran the team, and Ken Miles, who did the driving — both began their careers in MGs.

Ken Miles and the California specials

The best story on this page is Miles's. He was born in Sutton Coldfield in 1918, apprenticed at Wolseley Motors at fifteen, and raced motorcycles before the war. He served as a tank commander and landed in Normandy on D-Day.

He moved to California in 1952 and took a job as service manager at a Los Angeles MG dealer. His first American race, at Pebble Beach in a standard MG TD, ended in disqualification for reckless driving. Reading between the lines, his brakes had faded — his lap times, awkwardly, had not.

In 1953 he built the first of his tube-framed MG specials, known as R1, and took fourteen straight victories with it.

Over the winter of 1954–55 he built the second, R2 — the Flying Shingle, so called for its extraordinarily low, flat profile. It was a proper tubular space frame with the XPAG engine canted over to one side, flowing hand-formed bodywork, and — a nice piece of loyalty — a retained MG grille at the front. It won on its debut and became, by some distance, the most famous of the early California road-racing specials.

In June 1955 Miles was part of the works MG team at Le Mans. Sharing an EX182 prototype with John Lockett he finished 12th overall and fifth in class — a serious result on the world's hardest sports-car race.

The dominance of the MG specials in American club racing did not last. Once the Porsche 550 Spyder arrived in numbers, an XPAG-engined car — however cleverly bodied — could no longer keep up. Miles moved on: to Porsche, then to Shelby, then to the Cobra and the GT40. He was killed testing Ford's J-car at Riverside in August 1966, a matter of weeks after the Le Mans win.

The specials movement: why people cut up perfectly good MGs

In post-war Britain and America, a T-Type offered something precious to a builder with a welder, an eye and no money to speak of. The chassis was cheap and strong. The XPAG engine was willing, tunable and widely supported by parts. A determined amateur could strip off the coachbuilt body, build a lighter frame or a slippery aluminium shell over the top, and go racing for a fraction of the cost of anything remotely exotic.

There is no point pretending they were all beautiful. As one contemporary account put it bluntly, a good many of them were ugly. They were also, on the day, faster than the cars they beat. And what looked at the time like the butchery of a nice little sports car now looks like heritage in its own right: many of the specials are now cherished, catalogued, and eligible for historic racing on strength of their period competition record.

The best-known of the British-built specials was the Lester-MG, sometimes tagged T51. Harry Lester built these between 1949 and 1954 on MG TC underpinnings. They ran a steel tubular space frame; independent front suspension with unequal-length A-arms and coil springs; rack-and-pinion steering; a leaf-sprung live rear axle; and drum brakes at each corner. The XPAG engine gave around 85 bhp — enough in a car that weighed roughly 1,300 lb (590 kg) to embarrass much larger machinery. Later examples took the B-series unit from the MGA once it was available.

At the coachbuilt end of the same impulse sat the Arnolt-MG, TD-underpinned cars with Bertone bodies commissioned by S H "Wacky" Arnolt of Chicago — proof that the special-builder's idea did not have to end in a home-hammered aluminium shell.

The major specials, compared

George Phillips, Le Mans, and the car that became the MGA

The story of George Phillips and the car that became the MGA is where the T-Series racing history meets the car most owners already know.

George Phillips was chief photographer at *Autosport*. A former newspaper dispatch rider, he was remembered as a blunt, bulldog-ish character who grumbled his way round the international racing circuit for years, camera in one hand and cigarette in the other.

In 1949 Phillips, Dick Jacobs and Ted Lund were privateers running works-prepared TCs in British events. Phillips wanted Le Mans. He secured a private entry, built his own lightweight body over his TC, and ran it there with co-driver 'Curly' Dryden. They were disqualified after nineteen hours.

He came back in 1950 with Eric Winterbottom in the passenger seat and finished 18th overall and second in the 1½-litre class — a very respectable result for a privately-entered production-based car.

Abingdon paid attention. For 1951 the works built Phillips a special. Chief designer Syd Enever drew on everything he had learned from EX135, Goldie Gardner's record-breaking streamliner. The shape was refined in the Armstrong-Whitworth wind tunnel at Whitley near Coventry. Enever's sketches went to Harry Heering in MG's body shop, who turned them into quarter-scale wooden models until the aerodynamics were as clean as MG could make them.

The finished car was registered UMG 400. It sat on a TD chassis and would run to nearly 120 mph on a mildly tuned 1,250 cc engine — roughly a 50% gain on the top speed of a standard TD, and achieved simply by putting the same engine inside a modern, low, full-width body.

Sources are not entirely consistent about the internal project number: the car is called both EX172 and EX176 in respectable accounts. Both forms appear in print; the archive records the discrepancy rather than picking one.

There was one flaw, and it was ruinous. The TD's narrow ladder frame ran high, which meant the driver perched on top of the chassis rail rather than sitting down inside it. Phillips, exposed and sitting far too high in the airstream, hated the car.

At Le Mans in 1951, with co-driver Alan Rippon, UMG 400 retired around the 80th lap with a dropped valve. That year's winning Jaguar C-Type completed 267 laps. It was, on paper, a failure.

The point had been made all the same. Enever took the shape, sat it on a new and much lower chassis as project EX175, and offered it to BMC. In 1952 BMC turned it down in favour of the Austin-Healey 100. And the design waited. When it finally reached production in 1955 it was the MGA. Three prototypes ran at Le Mans that year as EX182.

The last and prettiest T-Type, the TF, was in effect already obsolete when it launched in 1953 — the car that would replace it had been sketched for a photographer's Le Mans entry four years earlier.

The XPAG as a racing engine

The XPAG became the standard racing engine of the special-builder generation for reasons that are not romantic at all. It was robust and, though its three-bearing crankshaft was modest on paper, the block itself was well-supported and stood up to hard use. It was tunable, with a good response to compression, camshaft and induction changes. And it was widely supported, with real specialists in Britain and America who knew how to get power out of it without breaking it.

Period tuning ran along familiar lines: raised compression; a competition camshaft; twin or, on the wilder cars, multi-carburettor setups; and forced induction from Marshall, Shorrock or Arnott superchargers. A well-prepared XPAG could double the standard car's output.

There was, however, a limit. By 1953 the overstressed XPAG simply could not yield more against Porsche and OSCA opposition without eating itself. Which is exactly why builders like Miles turned to making the car lighter instead — you can only add so much horsepower to a small four-cylinder before the crank tells you it has had enough. The story from that point on is one of weight, aerodynamics and chassis, not more boost.

If you want the practical side, see the Complete Tune-Up and SU Type H Carburettor guides.

T-Types in competition today

The story is not over. T-Types remain active in historic racing, hill climbs, sprints and even trials, with the MG Car Club and the VSCC running events throughout the year. The surviving specials — the Flying Shingle, Lester-MGs, and Arnolt-MGs among them — still line up in period-specific historic classes.

For an owner, competition history matters commercially as well as sentimentally: a car with a documented period racing record, or a genuine specials-era build, now carries a meaningful premium over a straightforwardly nice touring car. That is covered properly in the Values & Price Guide.

Timeline

FAQs

Did MG T-Types race at Le Mans?

Yes. George Phillips ran a rebodied TC there in 1949 and 1950, and MG built him a streamlined TD-based special, UMG 400, for 1951. Ken Miles co-drove an EX182 prototype to 12th overall in 1955. The Le Mans experience directly shaped the MGA, which entered production the same year the T-Series line ended.

What were the MG Cream Crackers?

Abingdon's works trials team, formed in 1934, painted in works brown over cream. They ran P-types, then supercharged PBs, then TAs from 1937. They took the MCC Team Championship in 1937 and again in 1938 — their final season.

Did Carroll Shelby race an MG?

Shelby made his racing debut in an MG TC in May 1952, winning his first race and later beating bigger, faster Jaguars at the same meeting. He said afterwards that the MG changed his life because it told him he wanted a career in racing.

What is a Lester-MG?

A British T-Type special built by Harry Lester between 1949 and 1954 on MG TC underpinnings, with a tubular space frame, independent front suspension, rack-and-pinion steering, drum brakes and an XPAG engine giving around 85 bhp in a car weighing roughly 1,300 lb.

What was the Flying Shingle?

Ken Miles's second California special, built over the winter of 1954–55 on MG TD parts, with a tubular space frame, canted engine and a very low, flat aluminium body. It won on debut, remained competitive for years, and still historic-races today.

How did the MG TD lead to the MGA?

Syd Enever designed a streamlined full-width body around the TD chassis for photographer George Phillips's 1951 Le Mans entry (UMG 400). The chassis was too narrow to sit the driver low, so Enever redesigned it as EX175. BMC rejected it in 1952, then approved it in 1954. It reached production in 1955 as the MGA — the car that ended, and replaced, the T-Series.

A note on images

Period racing photographs are copyright, and this archive does not source images from the web. The image slots on this page are reserved for owner-uploaded material. Where a public archive can help, the British Motor Industry Heritage Trust at the British Motor Museum in Gaydon holds an extensive period competition archive that can be licensed for editorial use.

Related history

The competition story sits alongside the mechanical and market context of the T-Series:

• The Complete MG T-Series Tune-Up — the practical tuning routine behind the period specials
• SU Carburettor Tuning — how to balance and set mixture on the SUs that fed so many racing XPAGs
• SU Type H Carburettors — the complete guide — the specific H-type SUs used on T-Types
• MG T-Series Values & Price Guide — how competition history affects what a car is worth today