Whilst we can never truly know the true extent of the head gasket failure endemic in the MGF (and indeed in the Land Rover Freelander and Lotus Elise), it is interesting to see that Rover Powertrain Ltd (the company responsible for building and developing Rover's road car engines) has not been sitting on its hands in recent years - and indeed there have been a number of interesting developments in the cooling system department, particularly with the introduction of the MG TF. The most significant of these is the Pressure sensitive thermostat (also known as the PRT).

The pressure sensitive thermostat

The figure below summarises some of the changes that have come about with the introduction of the TF, and with the pressure sensitive thermostat. It is interesting to note that the original thermostat housing is kept, albeit with an open 'ring' in place of the original 88C thermostat, whereas the new thermostat is mounted remotely, close to the under body coolant pipes.

Installing this new thermostat system IS an option for earlier cars, but the amount of additional pipe work is extensive, and potentially expensive. A more economical answer would be to locate a scrapped TF and obtain the complete cooling system from that car.

An aftermarket option that could offer a very similar advantage is the QED remote thermostat. (Thanks to Thierry Zoller for the images below)

Remote thermostat kit, as supplied by QED; a very similar kit is offered by Elise Parts - see Engine specialist listing for links

A close up of the remote thermostat housing

The remote thermostat kit is the kit that Simon Scutham was instrumental in developing for his racing Elise (see more here).

A rather obvious question is: "Which thermostat option is best for my car?" Unfortunately, I can't answer this at this time, although there are plans to further investigate the thermal cycling problem, and we may look into the relative merits of the PRT and remote thermostat.