Zed's Not Dead

James Crow has a bit of a passion for Zs and he rescued his latest example, a rather striking ZS 180 Monogram, purely to match a ZT that he also owns.

- Rob Hawkins

MG enthusiast James Crow had already owned a ZT in Kinetic Monogram Glacier (and his second car, at the age of 18, was a V6-engined ZT) so, when he spotted this ZS on eBay in May 2017 in the same colour, it caught his attention.

“I fancied a matching pair and the car fell at a good price,” he says. “The car looked in a sorry state on the advert. One big bonus with this car is that it has desirable full-leather seats fitted from the factory. These can sell for around £400 second-hand so this was a great find. They also have monitors integrated into the back of the headrests, although they don’t currently work.”

MGs with unusual or rare colours have long been collectable. Who can forget the MGA’s almost luminous Ash Green (paint code GN2) or Alamo Beige (paint code BG9)? And with developments in the paint processes MG Rover offered some amazing paint options. On first impressions, the ZS seen here merely has a white exterior paint finish but, when the sunlight catches it, there’s clearly something special about it. Known as Kinetic Monogram Glacier (paint code IAD), this pearlescent finish wasn’t so popular when the ZS was in production, possibly because it added an extra £1500 to the final bill for a brand-new car.

James bid for the ZS on the auction site and paid a bargain £660. He confesses he’d only seen the car in the photos on eBay and never travelled from his home in West Yorkshire to Essex where it was located. Instead, he paid a friend with a car transporter £200 to collect it. On reflection, this was a relatively cheap gamble for what was a one-owner, 13-year-old MG with fewer than 66,000 miles on the clock. Even if the car had turned out to be scrap the interior alone would have recovered almost half his costs, so he could easily have made a profit stripping and selling it.