Midget

MG Midget: BMC's Badge-Engineering Twin Outlives Its Sibling

The MG Midget was not, in any engineering sense, a new car. When it appeared in June 1961, it was BMC's second application of a body and chassis design that had debuted two years earlier as the Austin-Healey Sprite. It had the same unitary structure and the same running gear, dressed with a little more brightwork and an MG octagon on the grille. That kind of badge engineering was common practice inside BMC, and it invites an obvious question about the Midget's identity: is it a genuine model in its own right, or simply a trim level wearing a more storied name? The honest answer sits in between. The Midget and the Sprite genuinely diverged over time: different final engines, different survival, different endings. But they began as siblings from the same factory drawings, and enthusiasts have long called the pair collectively the "Spridget" precisely because neither name alone tells the whole story.

The Midget's early mechanical history tracked the Sprite's closely: a 948cc A-series engine at launch, growing to 1,098cc within a couple of years as BMC chased more usable performance from a small car. The Mark II Midget of 1964 addressed the roadster-typical complaints about weather protection and visibility, adding wind-up glass windows in place of removable side screens and a curved, more modern windscreen. They were small changes, but ones that mattered to a buyer choosing between an MG and, increasingly through the 1960s, cheaper front-wheel-drive alternatives that didn't demand the same tolerance for drafts. The Mark III, from 1966, brought a 1,275cc engine shared with the contemporary Mini-Cooper S, giving the Midget a lively powerplant that suited its light weight far better than the earlier, smaller units had.

The Midget's final chapter is its most distinctive. From roughly 1974, two forces converged on the car simultaneously. US federal bumper-impact rules required large black polyurethane-faced bumpers and, as with the MGB, a raised ride height that blunted handling. It was an unwelcome but externally imposed change common to nearly every British sports car sold in America in this period. More unusually, British Leyland retired the A-series engine in the Midget and substituted a 1,493cc unit borrowed directly from the Triumph Spitfire. Cross-marque parts sharing of this kind would have been unthinkable a decade earlier, when MG and Triumph were bitter internal rivals within the same corporate group, but had become routine by the mid-1970s as BL consolidated engine production to survive. The result was, on paper, a more relaxed, torquier car; to MG loyalists, it was also the moment the Midget stopped being purely an MG engine and became, mechanically, a badge-swapped Triumph.

The Midget significantly outlasted its Sprite sibling, despite these compromises or arguably partly because of them. Austin-Healey Sprite production ended in 1971 (as the plain "Austin Sprite" in its final year, once Healey's involvement had lapsed), while the Midget continued for another eight years, through 1979, closing out only a year ahead of the MGB itself. That endurance says something about where BMC's, and then British Leyland's, marketing priorities lay: the MG name carried more weight in the crucial American export market than the Austin-Healey name did by the early 1970s, and a corporation managing a shrinking sports-car business chose to keep the MG-badged version of a shared design alive while letting its twin go.

Published totals for the Midget's full 1961–1979 run differ. Footman James gives approximately 226,000 cars, The Gentleman Racer gives just over 236,000 (236,089), and the MG Owners' Club gives 224,843.

The Mark I's two-engine history splits cleanly: of the roughly 25,681 first-generation Midgets built between 1961 and 1964, about 16,080 carried the original 948cc A-series engine and the remaining 9,601 the enlarged 1,098cc unit introduced partway through the same generation, before the 1964 Mark II brought wind-up windows and a new body designation entirely. Published figures for the later marks give 26,601 Mark IIs and 100,246 Mark IIIs (22,415 built up to the 1969 facelift and 77,831 after it), and one source gives 73,899 for the Spitfire-engined 1500. With the Mark I, those figures add up to 226,427, close to the Footman James total.

Grassroots Racing: The Midget's Long Life in SCCA Production Classes

The Midget's genuine motorsport legacy was never a factory program; it was decades of privateer club racing built on exactly the qualities British Leyland's marketing never had to invent: low weight, a simple chassis, a low price, and an engine bay any weekend mechanic could work on. Joe Huffaker, who had run BMC's own competition department, left in 1967 to found Huffaker Engineering, and the cars his shop prepared went on winning SCCA national titles in Midgets and MGBs for decades afterward, including, remarkably, Huffaker's own tenth SCCA Runoffs national championship, won at the wheel of an MG Midget in F Production at Sonoma Raceway in 2018. That was more than fifty years after his first BMC posting and nearly forty years after the Midget itself went out of production. Mike Pinney's 1978 SCCA G-Production national title, driving a Midget, sits inside that same decades-long grassroots record.

The Midget's late-life notoriety extended briefly into prime-time television as well: a 1979 episode of CHiPs cast a 1975 Midget as the getaway car for a pair of bank robbers, a small piece of pop-culture trivia that, whatever its production values, at least testified to how recognizable the little roadster had become on American roads by the time British Leyland finally closed the Midget's production line.