The Roaring Raindrop Was the Pinnacle of Three Decades of MG Land Speed Records

At more than a century old, the MG brand still persists, though in a way that’s perhaps slightly at odds with fans of its classics. Once the pride of Abigndon, MG is now a subsidiary of Shanghai-based SAIC Motor, and you’ll find the badge on a series of EVs not sold here, but that seem to rate as fairly competent. Once upon a time, though, MG was a world beater.

We’re not talking about the likes of the MGA or MGB, both fun little roadsters that are currently something of a bargain in today’s classic car market. Nor does this concern the likes of an MG T-series, which brought the sports car revolution across the Atlantic, but that was more about nimble handling and lightweight agility. Instead, this story is something that most people would never really associate with MG: blistering speed. In a chapter of their history that even many sports car fans may be unaware of, MG also made teardrop-shaped streamliners capable of hurling across the salt flats at speeds approaching 250 mph.

Last year, MG’s current owners displayed a hypercar concept at the Beijing auto show. Big deal, you say: Everybody likes to show off futuristic one-offs that’ll never make production. This time, though, it was actually a look backward. Dubbed the EXE181, it was both sleek and angular—and it wasn’t the first time something so clearly built for speed had worn the MG Octagon.

Before we rush to the apogee of MG speed chasing, we must, of course, begin at the beginning. First, consider the importance of land speed record pursuits in the early twentieth century. In 1924, future Grand Prix winner and former pilot Malcolm Campbell set a new land speed record of 146.16 mph on the glassy-flat sands of Pendine beach in Wales.

The record was not really germane to the MG story, as Campbell used a Sunbeam in that particular speed run, and later another Sunbeam to break it. But the practice of record-setting speeds captured the public imagination, especially in Britain.

Campbell was thus not without his rivals, and one of the biggest was Captain George Eyston. When Campbell became the first man to drive at more than 300 mph at the Bonneville salt flats, it was Eyston who wrested away this record with a 357 mph run performed in a gargantuan six-wheeled monster called Thunderbolt. It had twin Rolls-Royce aircraft engines that displaced a total of 73 liters, and a combined 4000 hp. Eyston, who had received several military commendations for his bravery during WWI, including France’s Légion d’honneur, was no shrinking violet.

However, the rivalry with Campbell and other land speed record daredevils was a friendly one. That’s probably because there were so many categories in which to set records that losing the outright record might not sting as much if you had four or five other speed records with your name on them.

Captain Eyston was a gentleman through and through, with a lineage that could be traced back to the sixteenth-century Lord High Chancellor of England, Thomas More (the one who Henry VIII had executed). But he was also a brilliant engineer and capable of building some pretty unusual speed record cars. Once, he took the engine out of an AEC bus, placed it into a highly modified frame from a Chrysler, and proceeded to set several high-speed endurance records on the steeply banked corners of Brooklands.

In 1930, Eyston went into partnership with Ernest Eldridge, a ferociously brave and competent racing driver. Eldridge only lived to be thirty-seven, felled by pneumonia in the end, but he lived a wild life, hooning a 21.7-liter aero-engined Fiat called Mefistophele around Brooklands and down the open road at over 140 mph. With no front brakes. He is said to have once lost sixty thousand pounds sterling on a single hand of cards, and had lost one eye when a Miller 122 disintegrated under him at speed.

Eyston and Eldridge first approached MG with the idea of using the Midget M-Type’s engine in a high state of tune for building a streamliner to break the 750cc class record. MG’s general manager, Cecil Kimber, correctly spotted that having these two notorious speed addicts out there promoting the octagonal badge would be great publicity. The pair was offered an entire prototype chassis.

This chassis, EX120 (EX for “experimental”), had a bit of a rough start. Eyston’s main business was running a supercharger company, and when fitted with one of his superchargers, the car managed to crack the 100 mph mark at Brooklands—and then caught fire. Eyston struggled to extricate his large frame from such a small car and was more than a little singed afterwards. The car was toast.

EX127 followed, and here the formula was properly set. Built to allow the driver to sit lower in the chassis, thus enabling a lower overall profile, it managed to exceed 140 mph by the mid-1930s. This was excellent performance for a sub-1.0L engine at the time, and it was dubbed the Magic Midget.

Next up was EX135, which lifted some of its ideas from the Rekordwagens being used by the Nazi-backed Mercedes and Auto Union land speed attempts. It was extremely successful, running above 200 mph on a German autobahn with a 200-hp supercharged six-cylinder MG Magnette engine for power. This was so fast for the interwar period that the mechanics supporting the effort pulled the engine apart, slightly overbored it, and beat the 1500-cc record as well.

The outbreak of WWII interrupted speed records for several years, but MG returned to the land speed game in the 1950s, fielding several new designs. The wildest of them was EX181, dubbed the Roaring Raindrop.

All of MG’s other land speed cars were based on existing car chassis, but with EX181, the engineers were allowed to build from the ground up. They crafted a flying saucer of a car, ultra-low profile, slippery to the wind, and with the engine mounted amidships. That engine was a twin-cam 1.5L set for debut in the MGA, fitted with a supercharger and twin SU carbs, good for 290 hp at more than 7000 rpm.

With Sir Stirling Moss at the wheel, the Roaring Raindrop hit a full flying kilometer (0.62 miles) at 245.6 mph. This obliterated the previous record holder, an earlier MG land speed racer, by more than 40 mph.

With a slightly bored-out engine and racing driver Phil Hill at the wheel, EX181 managed to claim the 2000-cc record at just shy of 255 mph. But that was the end. BMC executives, seemingly tired of beating their own records, deemed any more speed-record spending as wasteful repetition of past success, and the car was retired.

You can find EX181 alongside EX135 and EX179 at the British Motor Museum in Warwick, U.K. Modern MG may be little like the original, but by both preserving MG’s record-setting past and referencing it with a modern concept car, the company’s land speed heritage is at least honored.