There is something obscurely shameful about the way MG racing is coming to an end. After the collapse of MG Rover last year, the racing arm of the organisation went into administration too and since then the receivers, PricewaterhouseCoopers, have been trying to find someone to buy it. No one did, and now the time for dispersal has come. The last of the cars is being sold off this morning, and a tradition of that began in 1923 will be snuffed out.
The 900-odd lots have been available for inspection for a couple of days. The race cars, and the vans which transported them to the tracks and back, the mopeds on which the engineers drove up and down the pit lanes, the endless logoed T-shirts and bone china, the spare exhausts, the bits of engine, the tailored car mats, the black nylon sports holdalls, the key rings, the hazard warning triangles, the spare spoilers, the front bumpers, the drills and knurling tools, the axle stands and double-ended grinders: all of it is exposed, bit by bit, like the guts and bones of a vast, complex-bodied creature which the forensic anatomists have picked over and laid out for your edification. It looks like an exhibition devoted to the condition of failure.
Among it all is one of the most lugubrious of all British triumphs: the estate car that holds the land speed record for estate cars - 225.609 mph on the Bonneville salt flats in Utah, with a six-litre V8 engine developing, as they say, 765 bhp at full whack. Perhaps that is the heart of the story: as German car makers came to dominate the world, as the British manufacturing base eroded away and as we forgot how to make things well, a devoted team of engineers in Birmingham were creating the fastest family-and-dog-containing school-run vehicle the world has ever seen. And this morning, if you are quick, you could make it yours.
The Birmingham drizzle doesn't help, spitting into the puddles in the car park. The rows of bright green and bright yellow race and rally cars lined up there in the rain have rough auctioneer's notices stuck to their bonnets. On the skyline, the vast outline of the main Longbridge plant looms like a giant sheen-skinned fortress. PricewaterhouseCoopers did not want any publicity for the sale: no photographers to come near the place, no previous or current employees of MG Sport and Racing to speak to the press, no brouhaha, because brouhaha about failure only deepens the sense of failure. Not that there is anything much to protect any more because the MG brand - or "marque" as MG people continue to say - now belongs to Nanjing Automobile Corporation of China.
So what is left in Birmingham? Little but gloomy groups of men standing around in their MG-badged overalls saying they won't talk, one after another, as if they were somehow responsible for the ignominy. No one will say anything about the way in which the directors of the Phoenix consortium walked away with tens of millions of pounds and their personal pension funds while the company they were said to be saving was heading steadily for precisely this: disintegration, collapse, the picking over of redundant parts.
There is jollity in the corners. Men - and they are almost entirely men - sort through the lots like conspirators in a black market. Richard Jenkins, fiddling with the passenger lid on something called an MGF "Supersport California" Design Concept Show car, says he loves MGs and always has because "they are all about youth, enthusiasm, fun, quality, speed, very British, with bags of heritage. In fact everything you want in life at huge value. Safety Fast, that was always the motto." The ghost of Leslie Phillips hangs about him, and he and other members of the MG Car Club, the biggest car club in the world, joke about the Germans and the BMW management who, they think, never understood MG. "No," Bill Wallis, president of the club says in a German accent. "We are not quite as perfect as we would have you believe."
Brian Griffin, who once worked here and is paying no attention to any gagging order, tells the story of the launch of a car called the MGF in 1996 when BMW was in charge and Longbridge was flooded with German executives. The English PR director was addressing a room half full of Germans and half full of Englishmen. A plane flew low over the building where he was speaking. "Don't worry lads," the PR man said, ducking "it's one of ours." The English half of the room burst into desperate laughter and the Germans remained silent. But it's BMW that has just posted a £2.8bn profit this year. And we are left, rather too literally, holding the pieces. Griffin admitted afterwards, "this is such a sad day for me. I sit at home sometimes and it brings tears to my eyes."
Outside in the drizzle, Stephen Rose and Maria Spurr from Dudley are there because they've seen the cars racing and think "we might be able to pick one up here so that we can start racing ourselves. This is our way in".
Bill Eales, an engineer from Leicestershire, is 'just having a nose. You never know I might make some money." His wife Annette would love him to buy one of the MG Power SW-R 5.0 litre V8 manual two-door Sports Coupe monsters in Dark Fantasy Chromactive finish (estimate: £60k on the road). Bill isn't sure. That was pretty well the price they were for sale at when new. And at that price MG Sports and Racing were able to sell only 10 before going into administration. Richard Monk, general manager of the MG Owners' Club, is "looking to buy a bit of MG history. But it is all rather sad and it does seem a bit piecemeal. We picked up some stuff when they closed the Abingdon factory in 1980 and this is it all over again." It all feels like a slithering end to a long story.
