Richard Veinot

Conwall, PE

Car:                           MGB

Model Year:            1980

Original Colour:     Layland White

Current Colour:     Layland White

Odometer:               36,462

During my vehicle owning lifetime I have had five MG’s: a ’62 MGA, a ’69 MGB, a ’74 ½ MGB, a ’75 Midget and the current ’80 MGB. The first car I owned was the MGA purchased in 1966. In 1968 I got married, traded the MGA for a much more practical Volvo 122 and headed, with my new bride, for graduate school in Ontario. I guess at that point I assumed that I had forever purged from my mind the impractical urge to buy another sports car. That all changed on my 40th birthday when Cheri purchased the ’74 ½ MGB as my birthday gift which quickly led to my purchase of the ’69 MGB, both destined to be project cars. To make a long story short, at about the same time that the ’69 and ’74 ½ came along I decided to get into blueberry farming as a part time enterprise. That took all my spare time and spare money so the MG’s languished for many years in substandard storages. By the time I got to a point of seriously looking at them as project cars, there was little left of them.  They were sold as “parts cars”. From the late 1980’s until the purchase of the ’80 MGB in 2003 I did have a fun car. It was a ’75 Midget.

The ’80 MGB that I now drive has a bit of interesting history. Near the end of the production of MGB’s in 1980 British Leyland dealers were allowed special orders of cars for their own use that could be made from remaining parts stock. My ’80 “B” was such a car. It was assembled and shipped on order of Rick Steinberg who was Sales Manager of Continental Cars Inc, the British Leyland dealer in Kansas City, MO. Its sticker price was $8,678 (US$). It actually landed in North America at the port of Halifax but was quickly shipped to Detroit and then Kansas City. The car had three US owners before me. It was mostly garaged and stored for its first nine years, on and off, being involved in the divorce property settlement of the original owners.  When it was finally released from the divorce proceedings and sold in 1989 it had only 8800 miles on the OD. I purchased it on e-Bay from its last owner in Kansas City. I had it shipped on a flatbed truck to Bangor, Maine and picked it up there myself and hauled it home.