2001 MGF 1.8i
Have you ever had one of those days when you really wish that you’d just stayed in bed, pulled the duvet over your head and taken the phone off the hook? For me that day dawned during the first week of December when it seemed that if it had even the remotest possibility of going wrong, it most assuredly did.
Things got off to a bad start early on when I tried to thaw my old Ford Fiesta daily driver out, following a particularly heavy overnight frost, only to discover that the heater wasn’t working. Which, perversely, usually means that there’s no coolant in the system. The AA chap who came out later that day soon diagnosed a cracked expansion tank and a pressurised cap that was no longer pressurising. Then he noticed the auxiliary drive belt, which was apparently busy shredding itself. And the chirruping tensioner, whose bearings were probably on their way out. Oh, and it needed a service. And by the by, exactly how old was that cambelt again?
No way I’d be making my 9am dentist appointment in the Fiesta, then, so I opened the garage to disinter the MG, fired it up and rolled it out onto the driveway. Then promptly rolled it back in again when I discovered that the offside front tyre was flat. It was at this point that I remembered – too late, obviously – the advisory on the recent hard-won MoT that read: ‘Nail in offside front tyre’. Damn and blast.
Okay Jag, then. The old dowager duly roused itself and off we toddled. It was a beautiful morning – freezing cold with blue skies and sunshine – so maybe things weren’t so bad after all. Only... the water temperature gauge never shifted off ‘cold’ and the heater wasn’t really, um, heating. I fear that the thermostat may be on the blink.
