Turning off the highway

It was a glorious, memorable day in the new Morgan Plus Four CX-T, which is the latest in a small but gradually growing niche of off-road sports cars. Ariel arguably kicked off the current trend when it launched the Nomad back in 2015, but more recently the internet went crazy for Singer’s ACS, which is a sort of modern take on a Porsche 911 Dakar car.

Rumours abound of Porsche doing its own raised suspension 911. There was also the Lamborghini Huracan Sterrato, which looked like someone in the Sant’Agata design department had secretly lusted after a Group B 308 GTB in their childhood.

I’m a fan. I like the idea of cars that broaden horizons. The thought of driving down a road but not being completely confined to it is appealing. Liberating even.

Of course there is no such thing as a new idea and indeed going off-road in a little two-seater is not a modern phenomenon. The T in the new Morgan’s name stands for Trials in homage to the off-road exploits of Morgans of old, when men and women would tackle unlikely terrain in unlikely cars. Traction control was the name affectionately given to the passenger whose job it was to bounce up and down on the driven axle to aid the purchase of skinny tyres in the mud.

In fact some of my own earliest driving memories are of steering old MGs around fields in the name of some light hearted competition. This was nothing extreme, it was more like a school sports day on four wheels. In fact I think there was some sort of egg and spoon race and, oh, the mild terror of a bucket being placed on your head and then having to navigate a simple slalom purely via the instructions of your co-driver… Compared to a day in a field with the MG Car Club, Lewis and Max have it easy, I’m telling you.

In fact any sort of car in a field is generally a huge amount of fun. Harry Metcalfe had a Porsche 924 that provided hours of entertainment on some remote part of his farm. More prosaically, a school friend of mine had an old Cavalier that we somehow didn’t roll in a field (that I’m still not sure how we had access to…). But you don’t need a friend with a farm to understand the concept; just think of the last time you had to park in a field. Maybe it was for something down at Goodwood or just a village fete. Whatever the occasion, there was almost certainly a nagging desire to at least spin the wheels up or maybe pull the handbrake. There is freedom in a field. 

And I think it is this pure escapism from the ever-increasing strictures of the road that makes cars like the CX-T and Nomad exciting. That tentative thrill that you experience in an ordinary road car when you’re in a grassy paddock is suddenly turned up to ten in something purpose built. Here are vehicles in which you don’t have to worry about snagging a splitter or scraping the underbelly. They are designed to be ragged and abused. 

Of course you can drive such cars on the road too and, far from being spiders in a sink, they make quite a lot of sense. As sports cars and supercars seem to become firmer riding and more attached to aerodynamics, while roads seemingly become less and less well surfaced, there is an argument that cars with substantial sidewalls and suspension travel that laughs in the face of potholes are rather less stressful and therefore more fun.

Alright, the UK’s roads aren’t that bad and such machines are hardly necessary here, but there is enjoyment to be found in an all-terrain car on asphalt. The extra pitch and roll in a Nomad compared to an Atom takes a bit of getting used to, but there is also something rather enjoyable about the exaggerated movements.

You need to allow a bit more time for things to lean and for weight to transfer, but these sensations are a big part of the joy of driving. It’s the same stuff that goes on in an Atom, just magnified. Removing a bit of the speed but significantly increasing the time spent thinking about how a car is dealing with any given corner seems like a good trade-off to me.

But by combining on- and off-road fun in a single package, the CX-T, Nomad and other cars like them really press home their advantage. Of course mucking about on some gravel in an old quarry, or at Walters Arena in South Wales, in some sort of off-road track day scenario (I think there is a market for more of this, by the way) sounds like bliss to me, although I think the potential for adventure is were the real appeal lies.

Perhaps a drive to Italy to explore the strade bianche, or white roads, of Tuscany. Maybe something bolder, such as a trip across to Morocco where you could trace some of the old Dakar routes. Perhaps north to Finland or east towards Russia. The sort of journeys where you might bump into Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman.

Naturally you could do this sort of overlanding in something more practical, but a rear-wheel drive off-road sports car with a manual gearbox is going to be more fun from a driving perspective. 

What’s more, I’m a strong believer in being as close to the landscape you’re travelling through as possible. The smells of cooking as you pass small settlements, the changes in temperature as you gain and lose altitude, the smiles and waves of the people you pass – these are the things that bring a journey to life. These are the memories that will remain in your memory, long after you’ve washed the dust from your hair.