Hobby? We don’t need no stinking hobby!

Some folks call what we do—working on, owning and driving British sports cars—a hobby. It’s even been legally codified, at least in Wisconsin, to the point that you can be officially recognized by the DMV as a “Hobbyist.”

I worked in a hobby shop in my teens. The attention to detail our customers brought to their passion was often astounding. A few had created HO gauge train layouts so detailed you’d wish you could shrink yourself to scale and go exploring. I recall one builder who scratch built a radio controlled Messerschmitt replica so authentic that if you had shrunk, you might find yourself running down the miniature styrene cobblestone streets of those HO scale wonderlands looking for a subway terminal.

In the end, the goal of many of these “Hobbyists” is the challenge to create a world, or part of a world that they can wholly refer to as their own—to be the master of all they survey. Tom Petty sang about it in his song, “It’s Good to be King.”

A fiefdom that is essentially a 4×8 sheet of plywood, or a corner of an RC aero park? I prefer the real world.

Owning and operating an MG—a hobby? Where did that come from? Sure, they’re smaller than most other cars, but they’re certainly not scaled down, and they’re definitely not toys. MGs are “real life” and “actual size.”

I drive my MGB almost every day in the summer, back and forth to work. I get groceries in it. I drive it to gigs with a guitar amplifier on the passenger side floor and a pair of guitars behind the seat and in the trunk. I visit my parents, my sisters and friends, and go to Brewer games in it. My wife and I circumnavigated the roads around Lake Huron in it. My MGB and I are active participants in the game of life.

Try that with a Lionel train.

Maintaining and operating a street driven MGB is not a hobby, but it could well be considered a sport. It requires the awareness and knowledge of your equipment and your surroundings akin to that of a professional hockey player, the ability to strategize on a par with a major league baseball manager, and sometimes the artful grace of a bullfighter.

I find this sport exhilarating, but sometimes it can be sobering. On today’s roads, roads crowded with vehicles that are typically twice as tall and often three times heavier than an MGB, there has developed an expectation by consumers of safety being a function of the car alone. People have been trained to expect heavy window pillars and air bags. To an uneducated eye, an MGB looks vulnerable, and I have friends who will not ride in one.

But while today’s new car buyer expects a cocoon, I consider myself well past pupation—I’ve got my wings, and they’re out in the garage.

My experience with modern cocoon cars (currently a Dodge Magnum, a car with more airbags than a hot air balloon convention) is that because of their very design and bulk, one is lulled into a sense of safety that leads to inattentiveness. I feel estranged and isolated from the driving experience in most modern cars.

I never feel that way in my MGB. I’m exposed to the elements (sometimes even with the top UP), the steering is direct, the brakes are not pulsed by a panicked computer that thinks I’m in trouble, and my driving inputs create a linear and predictable response. I’m actively participating—like in a sport.

And the MGB is remarkably stout, capable and durable—all of the makings of a good teammate.

Driving and maintaining an MGB requires attention to detail, perseverance, preparedness, a degree of caution, and if one is so inclined, a little superstition (I carry a garden gnome in the trunk at all times). Checking the fluids, the lights, the brakes, the spokes—it becomes a ritual, like letting your team’s pitcher choose the music in the locker room before a game.

The experience is real—interactive—not scaled down, not styrene or imagined, not confined to a few acres of manicured lawn in a county park, or a wafer board arrangement in an attic. Your senses are heightened, your focus increases, and you are fully engaged with every single nuance of the vehicle, the road and your surroundings. In an MGB, the driver is a teammate, not a pre-programmed yes-man. Driving an MGB is both contemplative and visceral, and the act of doing so is much closer to playing volleyball or soccer than flying a model airplane or switching out trollys in “the Land of Make Believe.”

It’s not a hobby—it’s a sport. That’s why they are called sports cars.

The Milwaukee Midget, aka Chris Conrad, lives in Wisconsin with his wife.  He manages the rental department of an AV house in Milwaukee, plays in two bands, and is constantly working on a 1971 MG Midget which he races at the Bonneville Salt Flats.