Morris Minor Owners Club

You need to engage a different mindset driving any classic car.
You aren't going to a meeting, and you're not going to get anywhere significantly quicker for the sake of 10MPH.
Caning the life out of it will just leave you both feeling frazzled.
Relax and just enjoy the ride.

MarkyB wrote:You need to engage a different mindset driving any classic car.
You aren't going to a meeting, and you're not going to get anywhere significantly quicker for the sake of 10MPH.
Caning the life out of it will just leave you both feeling frazzled.
Relax and just enjoy the ride.

You're right, and I managed it before, but I now drive for a living and covering 30,000 miles a year (part-time!) in a Mercedes Sprinter van, so it's difficult to adjust. But I'm adjusting back to relaxed driving.

30,000 miles a year (part-time!)

Good grief, remember who is paying for the Minors petrol and who will have to fix it if it goes wrong.
The pressure is off driving your Minor, enjoy it from the moment you get in.

Life isn't a race to the end, try and enjoy the journey, cos we're all going to same way.

Oh dear - I always 'cane' my Minor - that's where the fun lies! Passing all those slow Sprinter vans......

Dryad wrote:The engine does sound like it's running at the top of it's limit, but it could be me as it's been three years since I've had a Minor on the road, and I've got used to modern cars with 5 gears. I'll see how it goes when I've sorted the gearbox problem.

in both my modern cars 70mph equates to around 3k rpm..

with a 4.55 diff assuming you have standard tyres 3k rpm gives you 47mph, 3.5k gives you 55 mph

so i think you might have identified the issue.

You have to thrash it to get the speed. It's only a little engine !

Use A roads and enjoy the ride.

When we first went to France on the MOT we used the paege which is like an Autobahn but with tolls after doing this for a couple of years we realised that it didn't make any sense in a Minor, we'd arrive frazzled and need a day just to recover from the journey.

Now, older and wiser, we use the "A" roads and see the country we are travelling through, stop for coffee in whatever cafe takes our fancy, just make the journey part of the holiday.

Motorways are very boring, and Minors weren't designed with them in mind.
Discover A roads, and the country, and leave the rat race behind.

Péage I think! And - watch out for the 'X-rays' on the smaller roads. But I agree completely with your sentiments - I avoid M way whenever i possibly can - in ANY of my cars - not just the Minor.

Unfortunately I find that Aristotle feels painfully slow even on A roads. I'm not some speed freak mind - I used to drive a 1990 Defender that cruised at 55-60, which is the sort of comfortable cruising speed I'd like in the Minor really. With a standard 1098 minor would fitting a 3.9 diff make life a little easier for me? Someone said further up that going from 4.5 to 4.2 makes hardly any difference (I fear I may have the 4.5, although I need to do some more investigation). When overtaking things it's going flat out before I hit 60mph, literally flat out, whereas 60mph is ideally where I would like to sit on either A roads or motorways. Doing a constant 45 on motorways and dual carriageways is just not fun. It feels like it would pull a steeper diff pretty easily; I only use 1st gear when I need to pull away sharpish and I pull away in 2nd without any issues even with 4 people in the car. It flies up most hills in 4th and I often forget I'm in 4th, thinking I'm in 3rd, and only realise when I reach down to find out that I've run out of gears.

Does sound like something wrong - jack it up and count the turns! Once you know what you have - you can decide what to do........