Ted Barron shows off the interior of his 1974 MGB GT three-door 2+2 coupé.
Ted Barron stands with an open door to his 1974 MGB GT three-door 2+2 coupé, which was his car for the 24th Lake Erie British Car Club show in Perrysburg.
Roger LaPointe | Sentinel-Tribune
Ted Barron points out the 1974 Ohio license plate slogan “Seat belts fastened?” on his 1974 MGB GT three-door 2+2 coupé.
Roger LaPointe | Sentinel-Tribune
With the 24th Lake Erie British Car Club show in Perrysburg on June 4, Ted Barron was deciding between his 1969 MG MGB, the classic convertible in English racing green, and his red 1974 MG MGB-GT, with the fastback.
“Oh, they’re fun,” Barron said with a broad smile. “We got into doing rallies with the clubs. On the weekends, there would be sports car rallies, where you would be issued a route, with a description. It might be 50 miles, or 200 miles. And you were timed, with instructions, including distance, speed and time, with five or six checkpoints along the route.”
This is the second time Barron has had a car story in the Sentinel-Tribune. The first was March 10, 2000. That car was a harvest gold MGB.
“This model, the MGB-GT, was made in England from 1962 to 1980. They changed the taillights. They changed the dashboard. They put rubber bumpers on it, but it’s basically the same car,” Barron said. “The advantage of this was the 4-speed Synchromesh transmission. You had to physically stop to shift into first. You couldn’t roll to a stop sign shifting into first.”
The second car is in the traditional dark English racing green.
“The 1969, I call it a roadster. It’s got two seats and a convertible top. It was our family car for quite a while,” Barron said. “We never sat and restored it. But we were always maintaining it. We had it repainted. It was a constant. We were always refurbishing it, repainting, whatever you want to call it.”
His cars are both 4-cylinder engine vehicles.
The MGB GT three-door 2+2 coupé is red. He jokes that it has a backseat, which might be big enough for a three-year-old.
“Some people just took out the back seat and used it for camping gear, or other stuff,” Barron said.
Both of the cars are drivers. Barron’s 1969 had some serious driving. He bought it new. It was the family car that he drove almost daily for many years, but he took care of it. To the average person, it looks like a show car, but Barron will point out every detail that clearly makes the accountant in him a little crazy.
But he bought the cars to drive them.
There are lots of classic British cars, and quite a few iconic sports cars.
“Why the MGBs? Because they are fun,” Barron said.
The small cars are just big enough for two adults, but their elbows will touch. It’s a tight fit.
At 70 mph on a Wood County farm road, it feels like you are very close to the ground and driving much faster than you are. It’s not Doc Brown’s DeLorean, and definitely not a modern supercar, but it takes the curves much better than your typical family vehicle. It’s no lumbering pickup truck.
Barron has genuinely tested that fun factor. He used to do rally and gymkhana meets. Both types of events are timed, but he described a rally as more like a scavenger hunt. Frequently most of a day’s driving, each leg had an estimated time, but drivers were to look for certain sites along the way.
The gymkhana meet was much more like a test of athletic skill. Historically, the Hindi term referred to competitive games on horseback, but in modern times that morphed into timed motor vehicle contests with a series of events designed to test specific driving skills.
He described them as typically being held in parking lots, with a series of pylons or cones, for impromptu creation of tight twisting tracks.
Barron gets a wry competitive smile on his face, remembering the contests. There was often drifting and cars sometimes sliding off the track into the grass, or spinning out in doughnuts. The best drivers showed off their driving abilities, as well as the limits to the handling of their vehicles.
Most of Barron’s competitive time was spent in Rochester, New York, when he worked for the Eastman Kodak Company.
“Right now, in Toledo, we have one British car club. In Rochester, in the mid-1960s, we had eight clubs. Because you had an individual club for each market,” Barron said.
The Lake Erie British Car Club has about 85 members. Each of those Rochester clubs had that many.
He originally wanted to buy a Jaguar. When he went to college, at Bowling Green State University, he had a glass-topped desk, with a photo of a Jaguar XKE, as his incentive to study. However, an engineer that lived in his apartment complex had one. He didn’t mind the concept of owning the same car, but Barron was observant.
“The guy never left in that vehicle without it being towed back to the lot, or with the hood up after,” Barron said.
A couple years after graduation from college, he bought that 1969. It’s been repainted and had regular maintenance. There were a couple other issues over the years, but he would get them fixed.
“I’ve found it to be perfectly reliable,” Barron said.
He called it a sports car for the common man. The 1929 MG slogan, “Safety fast!” appealed to him as well. He wasn’t the only one who liked it, because it was the title of the official MG car club magazine. Barron said that it fit the car.
“In New York, we had beautiful rides to take. We had the Finger Lakes and winding roads,” Barron said.
He recommends River Road in Wood County.
“It’s nice now. There are no trucks, not much traffic. It’s a beautiful road, with beautiful scenery,” Barron said. You might see him going as far as Defiance, out for a drive.
Today, both of Barron’s MGs are kept in a garage, clean, under a cover. He hasn’t driven them in the winter for many years.
For those interested in the Lake Erie British Car club, there’s a monthly meeting on the second Wednesday of each month at Charlie’s Restaurant, 6945 W. Central Ave., Sylvania. For more information visit www.lebcc.org.
