I don't know exactly what the power of the other cars of the time
were, but in the early to mid 60s when the MGB's were being factory
raced, they consistently came in after the Ferrari/Porsche/Cobra leaders,
but in front of everyone else :) Triumph, AH, Alfa, Alpine, Ford,
Jaguar, Sunbeam, Maserati, Lotus and many of the above mentioned
front-running marques were whipped by the "lowly" MGB at le Mans in
64/65, and won its class at Sebring 12h *3 times*. Actually one of
those was an MGCGT but ehh close enough. All this on a shoestring
budget.
http://www.teamdan.com/archive/gen/wsc.html
And it did even better in events not as HP-centric, the most famous of
course being the 7DBL MGB winning its class in the Rallye Monte Carlo in
1964. I've collected a lot of results and some pics about the MGB's
racing heritage, because the poor B often gets dumped on by people that
don't realize that it was actually damn fast in the period of time that
it was supposed to be designed for (it was expected to only be
manufactured until 1970)
http://www.mgbexperience.com/sport/historic.html
Of course, with the lack of development money from BMC and BL, the MGs
quickly became uncompetitive in the late sixties. What a damn shame.
Although many US racers continued to race the B sucessfully in SCCA
right up to the end of production.
Skye
66 B
Word on the street is Larry Colen said:
> I recently was in a discussion which included the line "you call 65 hp
> to the ground a racecar?". Since MGBs came out in 1962 and never
> substantially changed, I thought that it would be interesting to look
> at the performance figures of 1962 Ferraris, Porsches and Corvettes to
> compare with todays cars.
>
> Does anyone happen to have, or know where to find these data?
>
> Larry
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