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What’s It Like To Drive A MG Metro 6R4 On The Street? Bring Earmuffs And Find Out!


What’s It Like To Drive A MG Metro 6R4 On The Street? Bring Earmuffs And Find Out!

The Austin Metro was the car that British Leyland hoped would replace the popular Mini and sell over 100,000 units annually. For the company, that was asking quite a bit, but somehow the Metro pulled it off. It was spacious for a B-class car, and it sold well enough, with over a million units finding a home before the Austin name got thrown in the can and the car became a Rover product. Some of those sales might have had something to do with the car you will see in the film below, the MG Metro 6R4.

MG, a name more associated with little British roadsters, had been reduced to just a high-performance marque for Austin-Rover in the 1980s, but if there was one model that could be considered high-performance, a Group B car was certainly it. Here’s the short of it: there’s maybe a couple body panels that could work on a Metro, a lot of fiberglass, carbon fiber and Kevlar, and a 3.0L V6 that could blast out north of 400 horsepower if the tune was right. Four wheel drive, mid-engined, and pissed off in a manner that was more violent rage than anything, the 6R4 didn’t have quite the reputation that other Group B cars earned, mainly due to the V6 having issues that kept it from being a top-tier competitor.

Owning a Group B car for private use is like walking your pet jaguar on a leash around a kindergarten playground…people are gonna freak out. The car has all the subtlety of a bomb blast for every last sense…it’s visually arresting, it’s loud as ****, and according to the owner, is “smelly”, whatever that means. But if you drive this little box of a car like you hate it, it will reward you by proving that it not only can handle what you can do, but that it can take a lot more. It won’t tolerate outright stupidity, but it will remind you how so many little four-banger Metros wound up sold: nobody could buy this car off the showroom floor, but they could buy one that looked like it.


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