Morgan and Pininfarina reveal striking £200k barchetta

While the Midsummer’s relationship with existing Morgans is very clear, almost every detail on the surface has been rethought or redeveloped. 

The most eye-grabbing change is the generous use of beautifully sculpted laminated teak mouldings that surround the cockpit and provide the car with a distinct interior character and a new exterior profile. Creating the teak laminates, whose individual sheets can run to 120 layers no more than 0.6mm thick, takes 30 hours just on its own. 

As a cruising sports car rather than a performance chaser, the Midsummer does without the usual Morgan flat windscreen, replacing that with a pair of lower, more subtle aero screens. The fascia and instruments resemble Morgan originals, but the Midsummer’s unique design adds a number of intricate new details. 

Outside, everything is recognisable, but different. The round headlights are larger and now incorporate both the indicators and the daytime-running lights, while the rear lights – made exclusively for Morgan – are also simplified. The radiator has an aero-cheating shroud, reminiscent of past Morgan racing cars, and the long bonnet gains horizontal air extraction louvres redesigned by Pininfarina. The aluminium front wings are subtly reshaped to carry the larger lights, as well as to progress the design. 

In particular, they are fuller behind the front wheels, which gives a more purposeful stance and improves aero. 

The rear wings also have a chamfer on their leading surface for aero reasons and there’s even a subtle diffuser under the car’s rear to counter lift at speed. Hand-formed stainless steel finishers along the sills add to the coachbuilt class. And the uniquely designed wheels are one of the most effective of a suite of weight-saving measures designed to keep dry weight under 1000kg. 

For most people, the Midsummer’s crowning glory is its elegant barchetta tail, which elongates the car (again to the benefit of aero) and perfectly blends Morgan’s unmistakable frontal features with a rear style reminiscent of some of Pininfarinas’s greatest cars. 

This harmonises perfectly with Morgan’s already stated aim of eventually moving the look of some production models forward a decade or two.

“I’m most pleased with the Midsummer’s rear three-quarter proportions and how the car sits, thanks to obsessive attention to detail to refine the wheel- to-body relationship,” said Wells. “Midsummer establishes design foundations we can build upon for future Morgan models.

How the Morgan Midsummer came about

According to Pininfarina’s chief creative officer, Felix Kilbertus, the Midsummer project grew out of what he calls an “immersive” journey between the two brands. It began with a ‘what if?’ session involving the two firms’ design teams in an English pub and progressed to more specific discussions in Italy over very good coffee – with lots of collaboration sessions in between.

Morgan design chief Jonathan Wells says the Italian firm’s young designers, used to working with the latest digital tools in a large community, “really enjoyed seeing how directly we at Morgan can interact with the people who are making the cars in the factory nearby. 

“It was pretty awesome for us to see their digital stuff – their power walls and VR suites. We started discussing whether there was a project we could do together. We were looking for something to provide a bit of a bang, a decent change of direction. Midsummer is what came up.