Cars With Maks

I test drove the new Morgan Supersport this week, and I came away with two conclusions. First, it’s genuinely wonderful. Second, I nearly fell out of it twice, and neither time was actually the car’s fault.

An Old Shape, Hiding Something Modern

The Supersport looks, at a glance, like something that should be parked outside a gentleman’s club in 1955, wearing a flat cap and smelling faintly of leather and pipe tobacco. Long bonnet, flowing wings, a cabin set so far back it feels like an afterthought. Classic Morgan silhouette, built the traditional way, on a bonded aluminium chassis with an actual wooden frame still involved somewhere in the process, because apparently some things at Morgan are simply not up for negotiation.

Underneath that bonnet, though, is where the whole plot changes. It’s running BMW’s B58 turbocharged straight-six, the same basic unit that powers a Toyota Supra, making 335 horsepower and sent through an eight-speed automatic to the rear wheels. In a car weighing barely over 1,100 kilograms dry, that’s enough for 0 to 100kmh in under four seconds. A car that looks like it belongs in a museum will, if you actually ask it to, do things that would embarrass plenty of modern sports cars with far more contemporary styling.

Almost Fell Out of It, In the Best Way

Here’s the thing nobody quite prepares you for: this car is an open, low-slung, old-school roadster with a driving position that puts you almost sitting on the road itself, and it corners with the kind of grip and body control that genuinely doesn’t match the way it looks. Which meant that on the first proper corner I took with any real commitment, my body was still expecting the wallowy, old-fashioned lean of a classic roadster, and the car just… didn’t do that. It gripped, it turned in cleanly, and I very nearly ended up leaning halfway out of the low door because I’d braced for a lurch that never came.

That happened twice more before I adjusted my expectations to match what the car was actually doing rather than what a Morgan silhouette had trained my brain to expect. It’s not a criticism. It’s genuinely one of the more entertaining sensations I’ve had in a car this year, the strange, brilliant mismatch between a shape from 70 years ago and a chassis that clearly didn’t get the memo about behaving like it.

The Golf That Didn’t Know What It Was Dealing With

About twenty minutes into the drive, a Golf sat itself about a metre off my rear bumper on a stretch of open road, clearly unimpressed by the vintage-looking roadster ahead of it doing a perfectly reasonable speed, and equally clearly under the impression that a car with a wooden frame and a bonnet from another century couldn’t possibly have anything interesting going on underneath.

I dropped it a gear.

There isn’t really a delicate way to describe what happened next. The Golf, and its driver’s expression, both simply disappeared from my mirrors, and by the time I’d got to the next junction it was a small, confused dot somewhere behind me trying to work out what it had just tried to intimidate. It’s one of the purest little joys available to a driver, watching a modern hot hatch, all smug and close behind, quietly discover that the old-fashioned looking car in front is hiding a Supra engine and a kerb weight that makes a mockery of the whole situation.

What It Actually Costs

Here’s the number that separates this from a fun thought experiment: the Supersport starts at just over £105,000 in the UK, which works out to roughly €125,000 before you’ve touched a single option box. And Morgan gives you a lot of boxes to touch. Handling pack, limited-slip diff, upgraded exhaust, a hard-top instead of the standard soft-top, custom paint and trim on the wooden-framed body. Spec it up properly and you’re looking at somewhere north of €140,000 without much effort at all. There’s also a more focused Supersport 400 model with 402 horsepower and a 3.6 second 0 to 100kmh, which pushes into the low £130,000s, roughly €155,000.

Is It Worth It

Here’s my honest opinion: yes, but only for a very specific kind of buyer. This isn’t a car that makes financial sense next to a Porsche 911 or an Aston Martin Vantage, both of which will out-perform it on a spec sheet for similar or less money, with far more usable interiors and considerably better resale infrastructure behind them. If you’re comparing this purely as a performance purchase, there are smarter ways to spend €125,000.

But that’s not really what the Supersport is selling. It’s selling a completely unique combination of old-world craftsmanship, a hand-built body on a wooden frame, genuine character, and a driving experience that nothing else on sale today actually replicates, wrapped around a chassis that’s genuinely, properly good rather than just charmingly wobbly for nostalgia’s sake. That’s a very specific thing to want, and it comes at a very specific stage of life.

So my verdict: it’s a buy, if you’re older, established, and the money genuinely doesn’t sting. This is a car for someone who’s already had the practical family car, already ticked the sensible boxes, and now wants something with actual soul in the garage purely because they’ve earned the right to want that. It’s not a young man’s first serious car, and it was never trying to be. If that’s you, buy it. You won’t regret it, and neither will the Golf driver you left behind.