John Johnson has had two MGFs and two TFs, all of them the with the high-performance VVC engine and all of them bought as brand new cars. Here he reflects on them – both good and bad!

My first sports car could well have been a Mazda MX5, but this was in the late 1990s when it paid to buy your car abroad where they were a lot cheaper. So I contacted a dealer in Holland in 1998, who was an MG fan – he was having an MGA restored, and his son owned an MGB, I seem to recall.

As I wanted the very best from the start, the VVC was the only one for me, and since then I’ve owned another MGF VVC, followed by a pair of MG TF models which were also the high performance versions, all brand new. This had as much to do with getting all the options such as half-leather seats as it did with speed and acceleration.

So my first drive of my new MGF was from Amsterdam down to the docks on the trip back. The car looked just fine in my favourite colour of Nightfire Red with a cream leather interior, with wood cappings on the door panels and steering wheel. The UK price in 1998 for a VVC was in the region of £20,000, but only £14,000 in Holland. However, my enjoyment of this car proved to be short lived, as not long afterwards the throttle body jammed open on approaching a roundabout. This resulted in quite a bit of damage, which prompted the sale of this car as somehow, it never seemed quite right from then on.

Not that this experience put me off owning another MGF in VVC form, as I bought another in 2001, which I kept for two years. This was in Anthracite, which wasn’t my favourite colour, and I didn’t put many miles on this car before it was replaced with another high performance VVC that arrived in 2003 which came in a more distinctive colour, Bachus Red, only available to special order.

This was a great looking car, but there was one slight drawback in that in certain conditions, I noticed some round dot impressions on both the wings and doors when the sun shone on the car. I later learnt these had been .caused at the factory by the suction pads used to transport panels on the assembly line. This paint fault only concerned cars which had a special paint job, the reason being the panels weren’t as clean as they should have been and still retained an impression of the suction pads. I wasn’t pleased at all, but I was even more unhappy when any dispute with the dealer or MG-Rover came to a full stop when the car was written off as I was overtaking a bus and it veered sideways as I braked to avoid an oncoming car – ‘written off’ being a fairly loose term, as I know it’s still on the road out there somewhere!

To read more pick up the September 2011 issue of MG Enthusiast.

Back issues available here.