Palm Springs on October 28, 1951. Jack McAfee driving John Edgar’s MG Special on the airport course. A burned piston ended the car’s aerodynamic-bodied race debut.
Our MG Mighty Midget, TC for All Times
By William Edgar and photography courtesy of Edgar Motorsport Archive
My first really dramatic recollection of our MG-TC was drifting through Sunset Boulevard’s curves, my father at the wheel. He’d folded the screen flat and the wind-blown tangs of hot engine and rubber were sheer adrenaline. I was 15 then, had already learned to drive the family’s Type 57C Bugatti, and knew that handling the little MG would be cake. All I wanted was a chance, but first I’d have to swipe it.
We were living at a smart hotel in Hollywood at the time that John Edgar got his MG-TC late in 1947, and the cut-doors two-seater fresh from Abingdon-on-Thames was parked in a lot just beyond the Garden of Allah’s kidney-shaped swimming pool and hibiscus shrubs. When my parents walked to dinner at a close-by restaurant (where the mandolin player was a Brazilian who’d come to the States with Carman Miranda) I’d make my move on the idle MG.
I knew I’d have a safe hour or so behind its RHD wheel and up the road I flew, feeling myself a reborn Tazio Nuvolari. I’d read all the prewar Grand Prix books and knew what those drivers looked like when they drove. I had their body language down pat and spoke the lingo, spouting engine and chassis specs. The MG in my grip was a bullet on the loose.
Earlier that summer, Roger Barlow, a California Sports Car Club co-founder, foreign car importer and filmmaker, had accepted John Edgar’s deposit on what would be a postwar sensation—MG’s belligerent new Midget Series “TC”. Perhaps no automobile ever fit as nicely the mitts of those wanting an affordable, great handling sporty car (under $1,800) that demanded so relatively little of its driver. At 5,200 rpm its 1,250cc overhead-valve inline-4 made a feisty 54 hp, sent aft to 19-inch knock-off wire wheels through a syncho-mesh quad-speed gearbox shifted with your left hand, while your right managed the flick-quick worm steering of only 1.5-turns lock-to-lock. Just 1,732 pounds was what she weighed, and her 15-gallon gas tank was good for a 400-mile romp without re-fill.
Funny, those first TCs came by ship in basic color lots of 20, ignition keys cut according to car paint, so the key to our red one would fit any other red TC. When the freighter docked at San Pedro, new owners were bused to the harbor to drive their MGs back to the seller’s shop. The little TC’s track was too narrow to fit ordinary car haulers and, because they were right-hand drive and in order to be street legal in California, electric turn signals—the kind used for trucks—had to be dealer-installed before you could take your TC home. So there they were, this convoy of shiny MGs rolling toward Hollywood, the owners’ first road test conducted en masse.
The TC’s drum brakes were Lockheed hydraulics, adequate for stock setup. Suspension on the 94-inch wheelbase roadster was semi-elliptic leaf springs front and rear. The chassis, underslung below the rear axle and upswept over the front, was braced with tubular cross members and box sectioned side elements. British to its yoke, the TC possessed more than a few quirks, and rode stiffly—characteristics consistent from the time the first MG came into being at Morris Garages in 1923 to begin the marque’s famed racing history.
Original MG TC factory brochure cover, 1947. Dealer Roger Barlow gave this to John Edgar to entice him into ordering the car.
When it rained you stopped, pulled up your TC’s canvas twill top and fastened floppy side screens to keep out most of the wet—never all. Its 19 x 4.50-inch Dunlops stuck, but still allowed respectable drift, and the dash-mounted horn belonged on a toy. But never mind being heard. Under hard acceleration, twin SU semi-downdraft carbs brashly voiced the car’s approach. It ran flat out at 73 mph with windscreen and throttle all the way down. This Brit marvel—its engine declared by motor journalist Ken Purdy in 1949 as “defiant and tough as a Staffordshire pit dog”—was a kick to drive back when Fords mimicked tanks and Cads weighed more than some cabin cruisers. Essentially, the MG-TC was a hot little item straight off the boat, and before the car publicly reached its hit status, Phil Hill, Bill Pollack and John von Neumann had one. So did my father. The difference was, John Edgar wasn’t racing his—not yet.
