Morgan Supersport review – the retro sports car we’d strongly consider over a Porsche 911
Morgan’s new flagship is its most versatile car yet. But does modernising mean losing the magic?
Morgans have always occupied a narrow niche in the sports car segment. Decidedly old school and more specialised than mainstream alternatives, they’re aimed at buyers willing to sacrifice ultimate performance, dynamics and usability in favour of the wonderful design and handmade flavour that makes them so endearing. The Porsche 911 is more capable, more rounded and easier to live with, but has rarely been on the radar for the average Morgan buyer, we suspect.
But things have changed with the introduction of the Supersport, a new flagship for the 116-year-old company that indirectly replaces the Plus Six, which ended production in 2025. In positioning, it sits somewhere between the Plus Six and the previous Aero 8, facing off everything from the 911 to the Lotus Emira. In style, it’s one of the most forward-facing Morgans yet. Save for it's LED lights and big wheels, the Plus Six could have driven out of almost any decade in the second half of the 20th century. The Supersport’s on the other hand is a treatment much more of-the-moment. Nevertheless, it’s instantly recognisable as a sports car from Malvern; it could only be a Morgan.
One of the most useable Mogs yet, too, with wireless phone-charging, Bluetooth for hands-free calls and, more prosaically, it’s the first Morgan in more than ten years with a boot (just big enough to store the side-screens in, so no need to leave them at home or stash them in a friend’s car this time). With considerable detail refinements to steering and suspension, it also promises to be a more modern Morgan in the way it drives.
It’s a not inconsiderable amount of money, at £102,000 on the road in the UK before options, although that’s not uncharted territory, as various Aero 8 models topped the six-figure barrier in the past. That price puts the Supersport level with a base 911 Carrera, and we’ve spent considerable time testing it on the road to find out whether Morgan has produced a genuine alternative to the mainstream.
Engine, gearbox and technical highlights
- Revised chassis that’s both lighter and stiffer than that of previous Morgans
- 3-litre turbocharged straight-six is borrowed from BMW – sadly there’s no manual option
- Optional Dynamic Handling Pack with adjustable Nitron dampers
Like the Plus Six, the Supersport is powered by BMW’s B58 3-litre turbocharged straight-six and built around a bonded aluminium structure with double-wishbone suspension. It’s an evolution of the CX platform launched in 2019, used for both the Plus Six and the four-cylinder Plus Four, which continues in production. The CX (named for the Morgan Motor Company’s 110th year in Roman numerals) represented a big step forward for Morgan-kind; this new evolution is named CXV (since it was designed in Morgan’s 115th year, and besides, CXVI would be a bit of a mouthful). It’s both lighter and stiffer than the CX chassis and features redesigned suspension and steering. So comprehensive have the alterations been that it’s required a fresh round of crash tests for homologation – a considerable investment for Morgan and its owners, the private equity group Investindustrial.
The platform still incorporates an ash wood frame beneath the hand-formed aluminium body panels (in fact, there’s a greater amount of ash than previously), and Morgan’s designers have made part of it visible for the first time – pop the boot and there’s a boattail-style wooden lip to the load area. It’s a nice touch, among many.
Powertrain wise, that retro exterior hides running gear you’ll find in a modern BMW – a 3-litre turbocharged straight-six mated to an eight-speed ZF automatic gearbox, with an optional limited slip differential. Peak outputs are 335bhp and 369lb ft of torque, resulting in a 0-62mph time of just under 4sec and a 166mph top speed.
Suspension wise, the Supersport is available with a Dynamic Handling Pack, a £3000 option that adds 24-stage, single-way-adjustable Nitron dampers (standard cars ride on non-adjustable Spax dampers). Front and rear anti-roll bars are standard; the front is a new, stiffer design than that of the Plus Six, which didn’t have a rear anti-roll bar. All in it weighs 1170kg – about a passenger more than an Alpine A110.
The Supersport is a particularly dramatic-looking car with the optional carbon-composite hard-top and Aerolite wheels fitted, as here. As standard the car comes with a black mohair soft-top included in the basic £102,000 list price. If you choose instead to have the hard-top you pay an extra £4194, or if you want both, that costs an extra £6594. The hard-top’s expansive curved glass lets a great deal of light into the cabin and gives genuinely superb all-round visibility at junctions, too. And even with all that glass, the roof weighs less than 20kg. Those 19-inch disc wheels, which weigh 9.7kg a corner, are a £4800 option. The standard 18-inch Superlite wheels are 10.8kg per corner.
The 19s wear very modern Michelin Pilot Sport 5 tyres, measuring 235/40 at the front and 255/40 at the rear.
Driver’s note
‘What a fabulous looking car. Quite menacing but very handsome, like it’s been created for a movie set 40 years in the future. You have to drive it in a particular way. It’s so torquey and light, it could probably get away with just three gears, and you cruise along on small breaths of throttle. Try not to hustle and overload the rear, pick your moment to get back on the gas. Do that and it’s a very tidy – and quick – thing.’ – John Barker, evo Editor-at-Large, who tested the Morgan Supersport at evo Car of the Year in France.
Performance, ride and handling
- Approachable, expressive handling with more poise than older Morgans
- Serious turn of pace from the 335bhp straight-six
- More bandwidth and comfort than older Morgans, if not as much as a mainstream coupe
Setting off in the Supersport, one of the first things that strikes you is how composed the ride is. In Pluses Four and Six, expansion joints on dual carriageways thud through the car noticeably, but the Supersport absorbs them smoothly. The body is well controlled vertically over undulations on the Nitron dampers, too.
The redesigned steering system is faster than before, and much more linear, with one of the universal joints removed to reduce friction. It feels very… mature, like that of a high-volume production car rather than a small, independent outfit. It’s not as brimming with talkative feedback as you might expect of a lightweight sports car but in fact its calm, measured accuracy and insulation from bumps and cambers are great attributes. Together with the smooth high-speed ride comfort, they lend the car a grand tourer character; it’s an easy-going companion for a long-distance road trip. Not an attribute you might have applied to all Morgans in the past. A bit of wind noise always finds its way around the edge of the sliding plastic sidescreens, no matter how determinedly you slide them to their stop.
When the road gets twistier, you might want a little more side support from the seats too. Though there’s much more than in the original Plus Six, you end up bracing your body with your leg against the footrest. There’s plenty of space in the footwell, because there’s no clutch pedal, the Supersport being offered as an automatic only. Customers only have themselves to blame: the vast majority of Plus Four buyers choose the auto option, so it wouldn’t be cost-effective for Morgan to develop and manufacture a manual option for what it estimates would be a small percentage of sales.
The transmission is an eight-speed by ZF, and you can use manual shift paddles behind the steering wheel if you wish (or push-pull the lever). There are three driving modes: it defaults to its regular setting on start-up, the perkier Sport mode is selected by sliding the lever across to the left, and Sport Plus – which further sharpens the throttle and gearchange maps – is toggled via a button on the transmission tunnel. This car has the £3000 Active Sports Exhaust option, which becomes louder in Sport and Sport Plus. Engine noise is well insulated with the roof in place; it could actually afford to be more vocal.
The auto-mode gearchange logic, refined by Morgan, is well calibrated and makes the right decisions at the right time, holding lower gears on the way down a steep incline, for example. There are plenty of those here. Winding our way further into the mountains, we encounter little villages perched on mountainsides with ever narrower streets, some cobbled, all steep.
The Michelin tyres give the Supersport plenty of grip on these smooth, dry roads. It’s a very calm car – that’s the word. As well as avoiding getting unsettled over bumps, its handling balance is predictable. This car’s dampers are in their baseline setting for UK roads – at 15 clicks out of 24, with 1 being the firmest and 24 the softest – and there is a reasonable amount of body roll. Dive and squat are well contained, and when you hit bigger compressions and bumps at speed, there’s no sign of the suspension running out of travel.
Brake feel and response are excellent, too. On a winding mountain road the brakes do begin to smell a little hot, but that may be due to leaving the stability control on (the car features both ESC and ABS) set to its halfway-off Sport mode. Switched off fully, the Supersport remains a predictable, safe handler. In fact, it feels like the chassis could handle more than the current 335bhp and 369lb ft. Which isn’t something you might necessarily have said about the old Plus Six, which could be a touch lairy at times.
It’s tidier too than the Handling Pack-equipped Plus Four we sampled on 2024’s evo Car of the Year test. The Supersport’s chassis, which weighs 102kg including the front and rear subframes, is ten per cent stiffer than the Plus Four’s (and a further eight per cent or so with the hard-top in place), and some of the suspension mounting points are as much as 100 per cent more rigid than before. It shows.
If there’s a criticism, it’s that its pliant, predictable balance feels almost more like a saloon car’s than a sports car’s; it feels like there’s headroom to make the Supersport sportier, more connected and sharper still – but there’s plenty of scope for customers to adjust the dampers. The optional limited-slip diff makes a meaningful difference to the handling too, and gives the Morgan a wonderfully expressive balance. Since it doesn’t chase outright grip, there’s a wide window to use the throttle to steer the car on pretty much any kind of corner. Doing so is huge fun.
The Supersport is a car with a far wider bandwidth than a typical low-volume sports car. Its aesthetics move the Morgan template forward without diluting its appeal, it possesses more day-to-day usability than ever, and its dynamics are impressive. It’s a car that could appeal not only to die-hard Morgan fans but to a wider group of customers who might not previously have considered a car from Malvern. It deserves their attention.
Driver’s note
‘I actually enjoy driving the Morgan more than BMW’s M2 CS, which I never, ever thought would be the case. You need to drive at its natural place, but it’s so easy to read and approachable. It feels like an older car in how you can lean right up to the limit, work with the roll and slide it on the throttle, but there’s enough sophistication that it doesn’t feel scrappy or out of its depth. I love it.’ – Yousuf Ashraf, evo Senior Staff Writer, who tested the Morgan Supersport at evo Car of the Year in France.
Design, interior and technology
The Supersport gets plenty of attention, all of it overwhelmingly positive. Its design is based partly upon that of the Midsummer, a 50-off Plus Six barchetta that was styled in collaboration with Pininfarina. This is a striking and exciting car to walk around, with some lovely details to drink in. While it retains the traditional Morgan silhouette, its shoulder line has evolved with higher doors and a lifted tail.
Controversially in some quarters, it replaces the traditional ‘waterfall’ vertical strakes on the grille for a textured finish (in satin chrome as standard, or dark finish as an option), and the louvres along the bonnet for an air extractor band behind the badge. The LED headlights incorporate the indicators, without separate satellite pods as per traditional Morgans. For buyers who still want a totally trad Morgan, the Plus Four continues in production unchanged and as deliciously retro as ever.
From behind the wheel, the sense of occasion is lovely: the circular shaving-mirror-style wing mirrors, the chrome lozenge of the main rear-view mirror, and the flowing fenders ahead. The sense of quality impresses, too: fit and finish is excellent, and the two-tone leather, walnut and aluminium veneer, and box-weave carpet all add to the ambience (though all are optional, among a cool £24,211 of extras fitted to this test car – more on which later).
The steering wheel spokes have a nicer finish than those of the Plus Six, and it looks less like a nondescript catalogue item with a Morgan badge. The whole interior now looks suitably bespoke, apart from the gear selector lever, instantly recognisable from older-generation BMW models. Why doesn’t Morgan just design its own casing? Because, as with all automotive switchgear, there’s a snakepit of costs in creating bespoke items (especially a gear selector, with its mandated safety protocols requiring iterative designs and multiple approvals). It would have added a scary amount to the budget, so the money’s been spent elsewhere.
You might struggle a bit for elbow space with the screens in place, and there’s more room when they’re removed and stowed in the boot. A neat design makes that easier than ever: slide the little chrome door lever a further click past its usual stop and the screen’s released, sliding smoothly out of the door. With the screens in the boot the luggage capacity is limited, but there’s a good amount of space behind the seats to stash road-trip essentials.
The pleated seats look lovely, although they could do with a little more adjustment. The base isn’t height-adjustable and is a little high, though the hip-point is set by homologation requirements. The steering is both reach- and rake-adjustable, which is great, although the constraints of the low dash place it a little lower than ideal. The seatback adjusts via an elegant chrome lever, but it’s a little all-or-nothing in operation, making it tricky to tweak while driving.
Optional tech includes a Sennheiser audio system (£3600) with a Bluetooth link to listen to music or make hands-free calls (an extra £330). It’s incongruous to see a smartphone slot integrated into a Morgan transmission tunnel, and in some ways it’s representative of the car as a whole.
evo Car of the Year 2025 – verdict
‘It’s a hugely desirable thing; a really, really special car and greatly improved over the Morgans we’ve had on recent eCoty tests,’ was Dickie’s summing-up of the Supersport, which placed sixth out of our 12 Car of the Year contenders. It’s a car that engendered affection – but also considerable respect – from everyone who drove it.
From how it steered to how it rode and how it went, few were left disappointed. ‘It’s not all about being locked-down and super-precise,’ explained Yousuf. ‘I really fell in love with it and placed it equal with the M2 and the Vanquish. It’s really progressive and adjustable.’
John, who had it third on his scoresheet, the highest of all of us, thought it was like driving a concept car, so seductive was its design, and he was impressed with how it drove, too: ‘You just cruise along on small breaths of throttle and it has M4 levels of performance. Following Yousuf in the Revuelto and having Colin on my tail in the GT3, the Supersport didn’t embarrass itself. If anything, I think Yousuf was a little red-faced that he couldn’t shake it off, and Col had to work harder than expected to keep it in his headlights.’
Henry had it a fairly lowly 10th: ‘It is much better than its predecessors, but nonetheless it is a car that I still felt like I was making allowances for. But it still gives a general sense of enjoying something lost to so much of modern motoring.’ And James summed it up like this: ‘A great achievement by Morgan, and a genuinely great product full stop.’
Price and rivals
Modernised though it is, the Morgan Supersport is still at the esoteric end of the sports car space. The obvious comparison from Porsche is the base 911 Carrera, which matches the Morgan at the point of entry at just over £100k. The 911 is more polished in almost every area and is less dependent on expensive options to be its best dynamic self but you do get something different, something very special, with the little Morgan that could. Further in the quirkier, more alternative direction is the Lotus Emira, which, while less well honed than the Porsche, could offer something slightly more rounded than the most usable Morgan to date.
2026 Morgan Supersport specs
| Engine | In-line 6-cyl turbocharged, 2998cc |
| Power | 335bhp @ 6500rpm |
| Torque | 369lb ft @ 1600-4500rpm |
| Weight | 1170kg (286bhp/ton) |
| Tyres | Michelin Pilot Sport 5 |
| 0-62mph | 3.8sec |
| Top Speed | 166mph |
| Basic Price | £102,000 |