Laughing around Mallory Park in a MG ZT 260 |Thank Frankel it’s Friday

My purpose here is not to road test the car for you but, if you’re interested, it’s a well-built, comfortable and quick machine, albeit without the kind of dynamic prowess likely to furrow brows down Stuttgart way even before you consider the absence of an engine or gearbox. It also has a bizarre driving position for tall people. Really, I just wanted to contrast it to another MG, about as different to this one as can be, which in many ways is the most fun car I’ve driven.

I am about to commit what many may consider a heresy now, because while I have driven the finest pre-war MGs including a J4 and K3 Magnette, the one I’m talking about is a four-door saloon built at the beginning of this century in the dying days of its then parent company MG Rover.

The story of the MG ZT 260 is so preposterously unlikely that if you submitted it as a script for a one-hour docudrama your commissioning editor would tell you to go away and come up with something more plausible. But essentially, once liberated from the shackles of BMW ownership, MG Rover felt the need for a halo product to boost its model lines.

Problem was there was no money to create a new car, which meant it would have to be derived from something that already existed, and at the top of a not particularly tall tree sat the front-drive ZT (née Rover 75) with its 2.5-litre V6 motor producing 190PS (139kW) and not much torque. In short, and for what was required, the wrong engine driving the wrong end of the car. Mounted the wrong way round.

So, it was decided to completely re-engineer the car not just to accommodate a 4.6-litre Ford V8 in north-south configuration (rather than east-west), but also convert the platform to rear-wheel drive and if that was not enough, of course design an entirely new rear suspension system. And make the whole thing in such a way it could go down the same line as common-or-garden ZTs and 75s. Apparently, the budget for the whole project was £30million, which even by the standards of over 20 years ago would be counted as petty cash to any decent sized manufacturer.

But they did it, and I will never forget presenting myself to Mallory Park of all places to see the results in person. There were two cars there – one for me, and one for the bloke I was told I had to follow around the track. The good news was he was a man called Anthony Reid. The even better news was that it was raining.

I probably have laughed more in a four-door road car, I just can’t remember when. Round and round we went like some long-established drifting double act because that was the way the car begged to be driven. I’m not sure I could have persuaded it to take a conventional line through the corners at any decent speed in that weather. You’d just turn in and the back would instantly slither out of line leaving you playing tunes on the V8 with your right foot.

To the outsider it would have looked like two cars perpetually on the edge of an almighty accident; inside it felt as safe as driving in a straight line. The only time I thought I might spin it was when I literally ran out of opposite lock.

In truth, it wasn’t a particularly good car in any objective sense. It was quicker than a standard 75 but a lot heavier, too, and such was the width of the bell-housing required for a longitudinally installed V8 squatting in a place designed for a transverse V6 of not much more than half the size, that there was nowhere to put your left foot once it was done with the clutch. Perhaps the Rover version – of which there was one – with its four-speed auto box would have been better, but I very much doubt it.

Today, and like every other manufacturer contemplating making sporting electric cars, MG is wrestling with the problem of how to make them not just fast – which is easy – but fun, too, which is not.

The Cyberster for all its qualities does not make the grade in that regard, a two-seat open roadster that’s not half the fun provided by a four-door saloon wearing the same badge 20 years ago. Perhaps Porsche will fare better with the electric Boxster. I certainly hope so.