Thank Frankel it's Friday: The unlikely V8 super saloon

I find the car fascinating for two entirely separate reasons. One is how it drives and we’ll get to that in a minute, but of no less interest is that it even got built.

Consider the facts. By 2003 MG Rover was on its knees. As you will remember BMW had bought Rover and in 1998 its CEO made the highly unorthodox move of launching the all new 75 with a barrage of criticism about Rover’s productivity. He suggested Longbridge might be sold and even hinted that BMW might not be in it for the long term. There are credible authorities who will tell you that Rover in general and the 75 in particular never got over that assault from within. And it seems that said CEO, Bernd Pischetsrieder, was not kidding: in 2000 BMW did indeed jettison the MG and Rover brands to the Phoenix consortium (having already flogged Land Rover to Ford and kept Mini for itself) and I think it fair to say most authorities thought the newly named MG Rover Group would have its work cut out just to survive.

What did it do? Everything: it went touring car racing, it commissioned Lola to build it a Le Mans car and it turned some rather boring Rovers into some more attractive MGs called ZR, ZS and ZT, the last of these being a 75 with stiffer suspension and a body kit. But there was a perception that the 175bhp of the ZT’s 2.5-litre V6 wasn’t quite enough for it to command credibility as a proper performance car. So thought turned to what might be done about this. There must have been several options, the most obvious being to get more power out of the KV6 engine which, with four overhead camshafts and 24-valves was pretty under-stressed producing just 175bhp. It could probably have grown larger internally too, without significantly affecting its installation in the car.

But that’s not what MG decided to do. In a move that seems bizarre when you first think about it, then ever more bizarre the harder you look at it, MG Rover decided to replace the 2.5-litre V6 with a 4.6-litre V8. From Ford.

Except it wasn’t as simple as that. Not by a very long chalk. The Rover 75 had been designed to accept only a limited range of transversely mounted small four and six cylinder engines driving the front wheels. The Ford engine could only be installed longitudinally and even if it could have powered the front wheels (which there’d never have been space to engineer) it would have led to catastrophic torque steer. So the car had to be converted to rear wheel drive. In engineering terms this is not that different to designing a car and then realising that what you actually needed was a boat.

The conversion involved not only throwing away the old engine and replacing it with the new but also doing the same to the gearbox, designing all new rear suspension from scratch, constructing an entirely new floor for the car and substantially modifying its actual monocoque. Then it was just a question of finding space for an engine nearly twice the size of the one for which it was designed, running a propshaft the length of a car never designed to need a propshaft, to a differential which had to be installed between the rear wheels without affecting the size of the boot.

What I find so extraordinary is that MG Rover not only did it, but did do without affecting the look of the car in any way. If you want to tell an MG ZT260 from a standard ZT, you have to look for badges and quad pipe exhausts – and the same is true for the Rover version, which was simply known as the Rover V8.

The interior was basically unchanged too, unless you count the fact that the driver’s footrest had to be sacrificed to make space for the massive Tremec gearbox that went with the engine.

The first time I drove one I initially thought it a simply enormous waste of time, effort and money. Normal 75s and ZTs rode beautifully but this one was merely adequate while the engine’s voice was always present in the cabin even at a gentle cruise.

But then I got to a soaking wet Mallory Park and spent an afternoon in theory trying to keep up with works driver Anthony Reid in another one, but in reality becoming more and more obsessed with how much oversteer I could induce without actually losing control. I discovered perhaps the most delightfully balanced, endlessly playful saloon car I had ever driven.

More than dozen years and perhaps a thousand car tests later, I still remember that day and still go online to see if there are any nice ones out there. The excellent howmanyleft.co.uk website says there are fewer than 100 still registered in the UK and nice ones are few and far between. But there’s one for sale right now with fewer than 50,000 miles on the clock costing nine grand, and if I could work out what I’d do with it or where I’d put it, I’d be very tempted indeed.

Looked at now the MG ZT260 seems something of a folly, but then many of the world’s most interesting cars are. And sometimes I wonder if those who signed what would have been enormous cheques to pay for its development did so in the knowledge that the days of the company were probably numbered anyway. If nothing else, it ensured MG Rover when out with a thundering rear-driven V8 bang, not a fizzy little front drive whimper.