IT'S a little bit like walking through Liverpool One on a busy Christmas Eve naked. Or at least, that's what I imagine it's like.
That's the thing with the Morgan Threewheeler, because you're cold, you're exposed and - although you wouldn't want to admit it - just a little bit liberated. Oh, and absolutely everybody, for miles around, will be looking at you. Jaws drop to the floor. Morgan's latest motor is marvellous for all sorts of reasons, but it's emphatically not a car for anyone who's a bit self-conscious.
The photoshoot Champion photographer Martyn Snape and I did with the Moggy last week for our sister magazine GR8Life was a nightmare, because the Threewheeler's got the same crowd-pulling punch as anything Ferrari or Lamborghini make. In fact I'd argue it's got more, because a Ferrari is at least vaguely familiar whereas a three-wheeled vintage sports car with no roof, no doors and no windscreen isn't. Every time we got the shot set up, someone would wander over with a smartphone and start snapping away themselves.
A leather-clad biker in his middle ages asked us how many numbers on that week's Euromillions he'd need to afford one. Two rotund ladies jokingly offered to pose on the bonnets, Page Three style. A talkative toddler demanded that his equally curious dad found out what this strangely styled car was.
All this from a small sports car that hadn't even been started up.
When you do you realise it makes a bizarrely brilliant contribution to road safety - the S&S motorbike engine, mounted right at the front, is so loud that no pedestrian anywhere could possiby argue “Oh, I never heard it coming”. It is so intoxicatingly and defiantly loud that I have no idea how it got passed by the EU noise boffins in Brussels, but I'm glad it did.
It's not really a car in any conventional sense but a sort of automotive adventure in which you're always the lead actor, playing the role of a plucky British action hero who spends his days bumbling noisily down the country lanes to solve crimes committed at quaint country pubs. Naturally, said hero can't help being a bit of a showoff.
What's it like to drive a £30,000 three-wheeled sports car which looks a bit like a cross between a Blower Bentley and First World War fighter plane? Tune in next week when it gets the full Life On Cars road test treatment...
