Moss Motors' 1973 MG B - Jay Leno's Garage

this is the perfect weather for driving a british sports car it's a little cool today kind of cloudy but you got the heat coming from the engine and the heater on so you're getting your feet stay warm and toasty and your face gets a little chilly and it's great it feels lusty as the english would say welcome to the episode of jaylon's garage the car featuring today 1973 mgb you know i have one of these when i was in high school i paid 400 for it drove for a year and a half sold for 600 what a car dealer i was but they were just the greatest ever this one does not belong to me this belongs to moss motors you know they're one of the suppliers we use all the time here they're the i think the world's largest certainly america's biggest supplier of british spares for sports cars or well any british cars really jaguar anything and they have just about anything you need and this is kind of their test bed vehicle and they get a new product they try it out on this thing it's got the mini light wheels it's got a super chat well you'll find out i got robert goldman here he's the he's the head guy over there at moss motors and uh well i have a lot of cars that wouldn't be running today it wasn't for them come on in how are you hi jay this thing looks great looks better than any mgb that ever came out of the factory i'll tell you that oh thank you yeah we obviously as you mentioned it's a test and development car for us but we try to keep it presentable these are so plentiful in the early 70s i don't see them quite as often but there's yeah you don't it's funny you don't see the cars driving as everyday drivers right the way they once were but there are thousands upon thousands of them on the roads today you know i we're a private company so i don't discuss the size of our mailing list right right but the mgb in particular still has a huge following today yeah this was the seminal sports car the mga certainly the tc you know what's so funny i see those all over the place the tas and tc's whatever then the mga came along and then the mgb and then in the early 70s they just got awful they had to because of government regulations they had to sit higher because the headlights weren't high enough off the ground and the big giant bumpers and then all the smog equipment right and they were down to like 60 something horsepower i mean it was just it was a shame because there was such wonderful cars unfortunately the british auto industry at the time they just didn't have the technological means to deal with the regulatory environment right so they struggled well this one certainly looks fair is this your personal car no this is actually a company owned car oh okay so we use it to develop products uh we have an experimental panhard bar on the on the rear axle right now um we developed our supercharger kit on this car it's got a five-speed gearbox which is actually based on mazda miata internals but it's all spoke gearbox for the mgb application yeah i think the mazda miata has probably done more to help british sports cars than anything because people realize how much fun those were to drive you know the whole generation never drove these didn't know them they rode in a miata and then this is sort of where miata got the idea probably more lotus and mg but that's okay uh and that gearbox get morgan uses it and their three-wheeler i mean everybody does it's a wonderful piece so what do we got disc brakes all the way around uh just on the front we've got a set of wheel wood calipers and at the back we have what they call alfin brake drums oh sure i know so yeah so that's a thin drum to help with its cooling these cars you can put disc brakes on the back there are conversions available but it doesn't have a big impact on the car most of the braking is up the front right right yeah i've got a jag over there with alvin break drums on it my 54. which i just love the look of them you know stomping is inconsequential to how you look really well you know any of these cars have have good stopping ability the will would kit or things like the elephant drums this really has to do with competition driving or or wanting you know the car to be capable of a little higher level performance and there must still be a lot of barn finds of these sitting around cars that people put away in the early 80s oh yeah absolutely late 90s we bought a uh what they call the limited edition in 1980 the last of the mgbs right a black paint job with silver striping on that and we got a call from a local wrecking yard that they had one that looked to be a nice shape sold it to us for next to nothing it turned out to be a great car that somebody had just abandoned had some minor electrical problems with it and didn't want to okay minor electrical problems that's that's my favorite some minor electrical problems well you know there's there's no question you get an old car that the harness has been all chopped up and it's got lamp cord in it and these cars it's kind of the big lighter theory they got used up and thrown away right and now today they're all being brought back so yeah they're you've got to bring a car up when you have a you know you know very well better i do when you have an old old wiring harness that's had a lot of work done to it over the years there comes a point in time where you kind of want to start over yeah and all those products are available you can basically build this car out of the game my favorite are the italian cars where all the wires are black they're all the same color so you can't you can you can't even trace what you're looking for you know it's a shame because these were truly great cars in the 60s and early 70s but i don't know what happened i remember reading a car and driver road test of the sprite and it came from the factory with the radiator hoses somehow mixed up so the car ran for maybe 15 minutes and then just everything overheated and blew and you know it was great to read it was terrible for the car but you know that's why car magazines i think are kind of failing there are no bad cars anymore all cars are pretty good it's just a matter of taste or features or what you like what you don't like they should have put some assembly required when you bought one of these from from the factory part of the problem of course in that era it was the same as true in the u.s is the 1970s were a bad time for automotive quality right you know they're transitioning from electromechanical systems to purely electronic systems and there was there was a bad time for for everybody's cars unfortunately and it's interesting you know when i take my older cars out i find i'm cruising at 55. and what's what people used to do on the highway when the speed limit was 65 you were going 70 in the 60s or 70s that was fast oh yeah now cars go 100 miles an hour you don't even realize it you know and so when you take one of these and this i think is red line and it's shaking and all it gets a little scary you know so these upgrades are great well let's start let's look under the hood and and i want to see the supercharger first okay so we can do that i gotta remember where the hood pull is and we're on my side here's the other side i think it's right because these were all right hand drivers oh you know what i'm screwing up it's over on your side i think my side down here there we go wow that's a nice looking unit yeah this is once again it's a it's a magnuson product it's a modern made supercharger is that a single su on there single su okay we had tried a variety of different carburetors we've tried fuel injection the amazing thing about the su carburetors it covers a multitude of sins you know it's true i have one of these on my turbocharged corvair we took out i don't know what has a cart or whatever it was on there originally we put the su on it it really changed it and they're really fantastic yeah it's like i say we we've tried a bunch of different solutions and the su covered the most possible use circumstances so and plus it's a carburetor that we know very well now is this just a bolt-on did you lower the compression ratio or anything like that no this uh this kit was actually designed to use with a stock engine okay so we've got stock compression we're running relatively low boost about six pounds of boost there are boost upgrade kits available obviously but the idea behind it was not to create some wildfire breathing performer right but rather to give the car a performance level that you feel very very comfortable getting on the freeway passing on a two-lane road uh it takes it you know very well from your vintage cars some of them it takes all day to accelerate right this car obviously we're just trying to give it a little more a little more pep a little more fun to drive and what was the stock horsepower this new 95 they were about 94 i think theoretically obviously the later engines from 1975 on with the emission you know controls and the single carburetor they lost a lot of horsepower at that point and this is almost as big as a cylinder head yeah but we run the same supercharger in an mg or a nice hilly sprite yeah that's one where the motor looks smaller than the blower itself what does that weigh about 12 pounds the whole set is a little more than that it's probably about 20 pounds okay yeah yeah well nicely done very good and of course yeah we've got aluminum radiator on the car from mishimoto right on the cars are a little bit notorious in this country for running hot right you know they were all tested in the uk in cold weather uh their speeds that they were used at back in the day were lower so in today's environment with high temperatures long freeway cruises yeah having a little extra cooling capabilities people in england had no idea what the weather is like you know when i bought my f1 mclaren it came with air conditioning but if i wanted good air conditioning it was another 25 000 well why didn't i just get the good air conditioning from the guy because in england it's it's it doesn't get that hot so oh that's cool that's cool enough is this an aftermarket piece yeah we've got once again unfortunately this is not a show car under hood obviously right but we use it for a lot of development work but yeah this you know cast valve cover is an accessory product we've got an alternator on the car um with a supercharger we want to run a modern serpentine belt right generators can be used but they have a bushing at the front whereas an alternator has an actual bearing and that's a you know i've i've got a cosmo and we use the little mitsubishi alternate it's like my god it's like this big that looks like a really big one is that an american unit yeah it's yeah basically a delco style right okay alternator um we do you know we offer conversions for all the various cars right this was a negative ground car but up to 1967 they were positive ground right so people convert them to negatives so they can run stereos in them right or whatever else so right it's it always kind of cracks me up because you think of these cars with flickering lights you know the lucas three position switch flickering off right right a lot of people like to run the alternators because they're running gps and they're you know their ipads now you might know i heard one of these rumors years ago that lucas the stuff that really wasn't up to par they would send to the furthest corners australia california so when it broke it was sort of out i used to hear that you think there's any truth to that well you know funnily that you mentioned that uh there was always a story with triumph in particular that any fenders which did not fit well on the production line went into factory stores and were used as spares so that's kind of a similar sort of idea i actually do not know one way or another if that's true but you know the biggest problem i think personally with with any of the lucas electric stuff is they just didn't seal the connectors very well right you know i've got uh one of those three cylinder sobs over there the uh water pump is also the generator so it's a water pump on this end generating the other i said if the english would make that we'll all be electrocuted you'd be dead you turned the key but just how at seals it's just the most amazing thing you see the water pump in the generator in the same unit and it doesn't bleed off that's amazing it's amazing oh yeah you do it right it'll it'll work so let's see what else is new under here yeah as far as under the hood on this particular car on it's really primarily the supercharger at the moment radiator alternator we do all kinds of stuff you know we have a high torque starter on it a modern high torque starter so you do a high talks high torque starter alternator supercharger supercharger spin on oil filter adapter all right these cars use the canister with a separate you know filter in there and then they tipped them upside down which is a really bad idea because they drain yeah yeah yeah so those are those are kind of the standard things that you always want to do on these cars you know we feel in terms of this reliable starter we also have an electronic ignition in it and that probably is one of the most important aspects of gaining reliability in these cars the points type ignition they were subject to where they were subject to problems you go to we use protronix brand which is a very very popular brand today they make a very reliable solid state ignition system and that to my mind uh really makes a huge difference in the long-term reliability yeah let's put this down oh it's just yeah we've also got hydraulic strides here struts yeah that's different people people don't like to do stuff by hand when i was a kid i thought this was so exotic ooh three wipers because jaguar had that too yeah three and you realize it has three because the two didn't work that well right well they had to meet uh u.s standards required a certain percentage of the screen to be wiped and they couldn't do it with the two so right so yeah that always made me laugh this chrome piece is that that's standard oh that's standard okay yeah it's it's the air intake for the heating system and these seats look much more plush than anything they have yeah we this is uh we manufacture our own upholstery kits in-house um in this particular case these are what we call a custom deluxe they're a little bit nicer a little better padded than the original seats we offer you know you can go either way you can go completely original restoration for concor or whatever right or hey if you want to personalize the car obviously it's got an aftermarket you know accessory steering wheel on it there's you can go with wood rim wheels leather rim wheels it really comes down to how you would no there's so much plastic i remember from those door handles jag used to have the chrome and then they went to the plastic later and they did that with the jag he got more and more plastic in involved yeah the the early bees up to 1967 had a steel dashboard yeah yeah rather than this padded dash and yeah they didn't have the consoles and whatnot but no padded if you hit your head they just hold it off and they sell it to somebody else yeah exactly get that guy's brains off of there very good i like the steering wheel is that a custom wheel as well yeah those are uh aftermarket pieces we have our own house brand uh there's motolito which is a famous brass brand they're done in styles that were very classically british car jaguars would use round holes in the you know the spokes of the steering wheels and that used to be a huge business i remember road and track and car driver and mg mitten and all those stores if you bought a jag the first thing you did next day was buy the wood steering wheel with the you know the sterling moss or something written you know and that business just disappeared all of it did yeah yeah what's happened is it's really uh those standalone accessory companies have kind of disappeared but all that gets wrapped into the parts businesses we operate today you can't just sit there and say everybody has to restore their car the same way right right and it's a stock hood yes as long as you keep it down it's good yes putting it up is like a nightmare you take it down in may and maybe you put it up december 1st again well that's where the top down regardless concept came from yeah i mean that was the great thing about miati reached over and you went like this and british guys were stunned how is that possible i mean i've got a lotus over there i need to stick a into c then x and your pouring rain very cool i always like to chrome bumper cars and a proper trunk yeah so there's a you know a spare tire cover that's carpeted with a logo on it these cars of course you had your choice a full-size spare or luggage right if one of the other yeah now how about uh the exhaust system you have a customer like yeah we actually uh we don't manufacture themselves but we have exhaust systems manufactured to our own specifications who was the one back in the day was a bar a bar there was ansa ansa yeah yeah those names have unfortunately kind of yeah because they used to we design our own systems we fit them to the car they're all stainless steel of course nowadays either 200 or 300 series stainless steel but we really we tried to be as careful as we could using a different material to to keep the sound quality right true to original we've had some experimental mufflers that make these cars sound like nissans yeah that's not the idea but i just remember like every english lit professor in vermont would have tweed cap and you'd have the string background swing back driving glove and usually a pipe and they used to use elf thing it was a cover for your pipe so you could smoke it without setting the car on fire it sit over there i had little holes in it so you could smoke your pipe while you're driving yeah yeah hilarious i'm surprised there's no sound system in this one right the car is the sound system right right you know that's obviously a very personal choice right that works for me yeah these are all of these lighter federal tail lights yeah now we have a full line of led uh replacement bulbs nowadays you can get brighter and obviously less power draw all of those types of products while the lenses we have to obviously maintain road legality right and so on but we do try to provide some lighting solutions these are your merits that is a factory-style mirror i couldn't swear that that is one that we put on i used to love the japanese with the mirrors up on the front they're not very effective up there though i see a little spot well if you get them set right they're actually pretty good actually and they they sort of look cool well once you know the beauty of all this is you can do whatever you want if you want to put fender mirrors on it you can you know drill a couple holes away you go very nice still have a manual choke manual choke of course and the cars a lot of people oh you know you've got to continually be adjusting the carburetors and they don't run cold but once again the realities are when a carburetor is properly adjusted and you understand how the choke works because most people today have never seen a manual right right but once you understand how it works they're easy to get going they warm up quickly and one of those 14 inch wheels 14 inch wheels the mgc which was this body shell with a inline six cylinder engine they used a 15-inch wheel on that car right i remember the mgc and it was slower than the four-cylinder i mean it had this big six and it had the power bulge in the hood yes but whether it was emissions whatever it was it was actually slower and heavier i tended to plow a little because i i wanted one and i drove when i oh it's funny though you're right as the car came from the factory there were some issues with the engine it was a new design it was too too many bearings internally for the thing to turn freely right all of that's been pretty much resolved by the aftermarket it's funny how cars that were rejected in their day often become more popular down the line well to me the my favorite one of all because i grew up in massachusetts was the mg gt it was this but with the fastback roof and it had the hatch and i thought that was a great because you had a heater and you could drive it in the winter i thought that was just the greatest car of all there's a great contrast for you because i grew up here in southern california and my folks put me in an mgb gt and i was frustrated because i couldn't put the top down right yeah it was always warm inside i wanted to i wanted to set it a couple of massachusetts winters horses for courses as they say do many people have the mg uh the gt did they do like the air conditioning systems the aftermarket yeah we uh we offered one for a while um we had uh supply problems they had to have the step away unfortunately but the original factory air conditioning systems are are considered a desirable accessory original there was a factory air conditioning for the mgb from england yes i can't imagine what that was it was just turning was it opening this just about now it had a huge compressor and i mean it had you know a full system how effective it was i honestly don't know i've never experienced one yeah we use vintage air and that works great because it's small and it fits anywhere and if you don't have vents you can just have a hose sticking out some and it works pretty good that's terrific well i'm anxious to drive this thing and give it a shot i i always love these it's been years since i've been in one well can i take this for a ride absolutely cool cool that's what we're here for cool let's give it a shot oh pre-staged the belts for you wow look at that it's pretty fancy it's been a while since i've been in one of these wow it started right there you're ahead of the game sounds good nice and smooth i guess technically this would be a resto mod because you've taken a vintage car and you just made it a bit more modern a bit better without changing the character of the whole feel and drivability of the car you've actually improved it i mean this supercharger really really feels good it feels like a just a much stronger engine as opposed to a supercharger power comes on very linear it's very nice these seats are really comfortable you've got a five-speed gearbox so that once you get up into fifth gear you can just get the revs way down and cruise yeah it's very nice i mean it all looks original and with the exception of just a few things i guess it is well a few things transmission seat you know i like the high torque starter that really helped you just turn the key and it spins it so quickly the engine fires the alternator keeps the lights bright it's great they're all sensible upgrades that if you wanted to make it completely original you can go back at any time and it doesn't hurt the value of the car or the look of the feel of the car it doesn't change the character of the car i guess is what i'm saying well it's certainly the strongest mgb i've ever driven but the car feels nicely planted it feels secure going into turns so at 60 it turned about 3200 rpm that's not bad i've got a tr3 it's got the overdrive unit that really makes a big difference but you know moss motors really is a godsend for those of us that like old british vehicles because they just have everything all the carburetor parts all the gaskets whatever you need i can't imagine how many cars i have that would not be running was enough for those guys that's why i invited him down i thought it'd be fun to share with you guys i'm not getting anything free out of it i just think you're a really good supplier and if you got these you have one of these kind of cars you should know about them it feels lusty as the english would say this is the perfect weather for driving a british sports car it's a little cool today kind of cloudy but you got the heat coming from the engine and the heater on so you're getting your feet stay warm and toasty and your face gets a little chilly and it's great as i said before they were never this good when they came out of the factory sounds throaty when you put your foot in it put it in fifth like an overdrive gear in this thing it seems if i sit a little bit higher in this car than i did in mine it might be because it has these more expensive seats might be sitting up a bit but this engine feels quite nice this engine was long in the tooth in the 60s well let's brought back a lot of memories driving this whole thing you know i think i've driven mgb in probably 25 years so it's certainly a lot of fun it's the best one i've ever driven so i want to thank moss motors for just keeping all this stuff alive you know they do a great job if you got one of these old girls give them a call they'll get whatever parts you need so anyway listen thanks for uh thanks for watching and i hope you enjoyed this little piece of english history see you guys next week bye [Music] uh

Channel: Jay Leno's Garage

Views: 297,475

Rating: 4.9501305 out of 5

Keywords: Jay, Lenos, Garage, Moss Motors, MG, British cars, sports cars, coupe, roadster, Mazda Miata, Robert Goldman, car porn, gearhead, car guy, car enthusiast, modifications, mods

Id: Y5Qppmbj8CY

Length: 24min 25sec (1465 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 26 2021