Magnette Dragster (Part I)
or
The fastest M.G. ever?

Ever since I've been involved with cars I've been a huge fan of old British cars and also drag racing, My dream was to one day combine the two. This was all brought to a stop when my private situation changed. Eventually I re-married but house restoration and the usual life stuff got in the way and I had five years with no toy. We had just finished completely rebuilding the kitchen in late 2005 and my wife said to me that it was about time I had a new toy in my life instead of just working and doing house things. It must have been about 2 minutes and I was soon trawling through the magazines and ebay. Admittedly I was looking for a hot rodded Ford Pop or something along those lines but when this ebay advert popped up for a 1955 Magnette it really caught my eye...probably because I couldn't work out which bit of it was actually MG...and I had to go and have a look.
My friend Steve went with me over to Cirencester allegedly to stop me getting too excited about it but more than likely because we needed to be going fast again. As soon as we turned in to the road and saw the car parked there I knew I had to have it. A good inspection soon revealed that this was a very tired car and it had more than it's share of faults. A few cups of tea (how terribly British!) and a lot of haggling later I became the nearly proud owner of the strange little yellow beast with the very tall wing.

This is what he's talking about:

it's street legal!	parachute for breaking	that's not a B-series engine	Aah, the sign says MG!

The original idea for the car was to keep it road legal as I like to get my moneys worth out of my cars but to also use it for drag racing as well.
 

	The original plan was for a re-wire as there didn't seem to be more than 15cm (6" in old money) of wire the same colour. It was a major fire hazard. It soon became apparent that the entire dashboard and surrounding area was beyond being used in a race car. The dash had been replated three times and having a single circuit brake master cylinder, which in itself is very dangerous when you have front wheels a lot narrower than the rear, mounted in the cockpit next to the steering column is at best a very poor design and at worst is potentially lethal.
	The only sensible solution was to rip everything out and re-assess the whole are once i could see the general condition behind the dash. The Plan - Re-mount the steering column to bring the mountings level plus make them removable, fit a dual brake master cylinder with bias bar adjustment and finally fabricate the new dashboard.
	The steering column is temporarily mounted and the dash frame fabrication begins.
	The dash frame is made nice and curvy to give as much cabin room as possible. The top plates are fabricated from alloy and are removable to give better engine access.
	Whilst the fabricating has been going on i've been getting little parcels  delivered each day.... New throttle pedal and cable, new gauges,wiring loom kit, better ignition coil and soon. The dash frame is made with a box on the drivers side to mount the pedals in, moving them further away and a matching box on the passenger side to mount the fuse/relay box. The top mounts for the steering column have been machined so that they sit level and I then machined some inserts for the mounts to screw into on the cage cross tube.
	The sheet metalwork begins by forming the fuse box recess and surrounding plates. The plan is to have the gauges mounted in a pod centrally mounted above the transmission tunnel, angled towards the driver.
	A change of plan! The technical hitch :-There really wasn't enough room to get the gauge pod in place, make it look right and still leave access room for the distributor. Luckily not too much to change!
	All of the main dash panels are now in place. The missing centre plate is now tl removable to allow easy access to the distributor. The fuse board is now mounted and will have a removable panel covering it.
	The new position for the gauges! The panel is removable with the gauges mounted and they are wired into plugs on the dash.The small holes in the dash between the gauges are for various warning lights.
	The Brakes:-1 managed to find a brake set-up that, as a complete unit, was perfect for my application. It's the brake system from a Caterham 7 and comes complete with the bulkhead plate as well. I welded the lower swivel for the pedal to the chassis rail and then trimmed the bulkhead plate to fit the aperture. This was then tucked into place and everything trial fitted before the final seam welding.

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