I have a fairly comprehensive, all-enveloping hatred of MGs. They may have been acceptable when Kenneth More was stepping out of his Spit and taking Susannah York to the saloon bar at the Downed German, but by the time I was old enough to notice they were absolutely horrid.

With their wheezing, asthmatic little engines, they were as sporty as a man in an iron lung. And with their botched suspension they cornered like a horse in wellingtons.

No, really. When the American safety wallahs announced in the early 1970s that every car’s headlights must be a certain height above the road, all the car makers redesigned their cars’ noses to comply with the new legislation.

Not MG, though. They simply stuck blocks in the suspension to raise the whole car a little higher off the ground. That’s a bit like cutting out draughts by fitting uPVC windows. Effective, but dynamically and aesthetically unwise.

And I haven’t even mentioned the sort of people who drive the damn things. They are not hairdressers. In fact, come to think of it, they wouldn’t know what a hairdresser was, with their mad barnets and their huge, sprouting face fuzz. And they are always dirty because they have to spend so much time under the car, mending it.

David Attenborough is currently putting the finishing touches to a six-part documentary about the life of bugs. Doubtless he has been to the ends of the earth in search of all the most rare and disgusting creepy-crawlies. But there was no need because there’s no insect that can’t be found under an MG driver’s fingernails.

These guys bathe in engine oil. They eat Swarfega. And they talk and talk and talk about nothing but their infernal, limp-wristed, boneless-handling, sloth-slow, pug-ugly cars that are so unreliable even the damn wheels need servicing every few hundred yards.

“It takes you back,” they always say. And I’m sure it does, to a time of diphtheria and demob suits. Frankly, I’d rather go forward, and that brings me slithering to a halt beside the car you see in the pictures this week: the new MG SV.

My God it’s a beast. There’s nothing wheezing or asthmatic about the huge V8 that lives under its bonnet. Though it can muster a wonderful bronchial cough when you poke its throttle with a stick.

Honestly, when you hear this thing start it feels like everything within a hundred yards of the air intakes, all the air, the birds and the flies, have been sucked into the cylinders.

It started out in life as one of the world’s worst engines: the 4.6 that powers Ford’s Mustang in America. But Rover have changed everything, even the block, to create a snarling, chesty monster that spits fire and havoc down those twin Scorpion exhaust vents.

Fuel consumption? Well let me put it this way. Flat-out at 165mph it’s downing a kilo of unleaded every minute.

In standard tune you get 320bhp which, in a car that’s made entirely from carbon fibre and weighs just 1,400kg, is enough to get you from 0 to 60mph in 5.3sec. The car I drove, however, had been tweaked to give 400bhp. And you can buy a nitrous kit to take it up to 1,000bhp.

Yes, 1,000bhp — 200 more than Michael Schumacher used to win his last grand prix championship.

All we ever hear about Rover these days are the disaster stories. We’ve had the pension fund scandal, the losses, the deal with the Chinese to produce cars jointly — that fell through — and the tie-up with the Indians that has spawned the horrid little City Rover.

Even this new SV was born from a botch-up. Rover spent a couple of million buying an Italian company called Qvale that nobody had even heard of, and no one could pronounce.

I think they thought they might be able to cross the word Qvale out and put an MG badge on instead.

But in fact they ended up throwing pretty much the whole thing away.

I’m told that only its windscreen wiper motors have survived.

The new chassis of the SV is therefore being made in Italy by the same firm that makes chassis for Ferrari and Lamborghini. The body is made on the Isle of Wight. The engine is American. And Rover’s so short of money it has to borrow trucks to bring all these pieces to Longbridge, where they’re all nailed together. This does not bode well.

So I am genuinely delighted to report that the heart of the beast is wonderful. A bona fide masterpiece.

The handling’s pretty good, too. There isn’t as much grip as you might have been expecting, but when you overstep the mark it puts a huge, gleaming smile on your face as the rear steps out of line in a totally controlled power slide.

Whoever set up this chassis knew what he was doing and what the enthusiastic driver wants. He is one great engineer and I hope he makes man-love with the man who did the engine. I hope too that they have many man-babies together and that they all go on to be engineers as well.

And oh, how I wish we could end it there. But we can’t. There are many more inches of newsprint to fill and I’m afraid it’s bad news all the way.

First of all, this car is not priced to compete with a TVR or a Ford Mustang. It is priced to compete with the Porsche GT3, and that means it arrives on the market with its Birmingham accent, sporting a price tag of £75,000. And that’s for the base model. The faster ones will be up there in six-figure la-la Lambo land. ()

Now this car is fast. Be in no doubt about that. But it simply isn’t as fast as the German and Italian thoroughbreds with which it must compete. It’s not very well equipped, either. There is no satellite navigation, no airbag, and the seats must be moved fore and aft manually.

More worryingly, it’s not very well made. The day started with a dead instrument panel, which was a nuisance but not the end of the world. But pretty soon the antilock braking had also packed up and that was more armageddonish.

Inside, there’s nowhere to put your left leg, the windows don’t go all the way down, the gearbox is awful, the wind noise at speed is terrible, the trim is woefully cheap, the seats don’t offer enough lateral support, and it is very easy to bang your head on the door frame. I know. One minute I was going round a corner, the next the rear tyres found some grip and shortly afterwards there was much sickness and a handful of stars.

Some said this was mild concussion. But I thought it might have had something to do with the petrol fumes that leak into the cockpit when you’re throwing it around a bit. Or maybe I thought it was petrol fumes because I was concussed. Or perhaps someone slipped me a tab of acid. God knows, but for 24 hours after driving this car I felt decidedly odd.

I feel odd now, and a bit cruel, because I wanted to like the SV. I think it is extremely good looking, a brutal symphony of testosterone and muscle, and I wish all cars sounded like it. At 150mph it sounds . . . well, like rock’n’roll.

I really did hope that it would detonate the whole prissy wet weekend that is the MG experience by running off with your sister to a heroin den in east Africa. I wanted it to be bad. I wanted to take it to an MG owners’ club event and blow all the bugs out of their beards. But alas . . .

Yes, it is exquisite to drive, but the attention to detail and the overall quality just isn’t good enough for a £75,000 car.

And speaking of attention to detail, Happy Christmas to you all.

VITAL STATISTICS

Model MG SV
Engine type V8, 4600cc
Power 320bhp @ 6000rpm
Torque 302 lb ft @ 4750rpm
Transmission Five-speed manual, rear-wheel drive
Suspension (front and rear) Double wishbone, anti-roll bars
Tyres (front) 225/40 ZR18 (rear) 265/40 ZR18
Fuel 20.5mpg (combined)
CO2 324g/km
Acceleration 0 to 60mph: 5.3sec
Top speed 165mph
Price £75,000
Verdict A real rip-snorter of a drive, but unrefined and overpriced

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