Triumph TR7 – Driven To Write

Being There [Part Four]

The best of times, the worst of times.

Peak B: 1973 MGB roadster. Image: mgb1967.com

In the wake of BLMC’s 1968 marriage of convenience, Donald Stokes and his management team began piecing together a product strategy for the multifarious (and in some cases) overlapping marques that constituted the increasingly unwieldy British car giant. Amid this new order, the fate of MG would be subordinated to that of Triumph. And while some speculative MG designs were proposed, the reality was that Abingdon came virtually last in the BLMC Chairman’s priority list – the MGB remained a successful, profitable model line – a cheap nip and tuck and it was good for another couple of years.

Abingdon’s fears came to fruition in 1971, Stokes and his BLMC board electing to Continue reading “Being There [Part Four]”

Two Word Epitaph

The Triumph TR7 Convertible embodied the BL charter in microcosm.

“If only this could have been the TR7 that was launched five years ago instead of the poorly-assembled and inadequately developed Speke-built versions that so quickly acquired a tarnished reputation.” [Howard Walker, Motor – August 30 1980.]

If only. Those two simple words perhaps most poignantly encapsulate the British Leyland charter. Because amid the egos, the politics, the industrial strife and lost hopes chiselled onto BL’s cenotaph, there were also well-conceived, rational motor cars which deserved a better fate. Continue reading “Two Word Epitaph”

Sideswipe

Driven to Write takes aim at Triumph’s putative TR7 successor and gives it both barrels.

1979 Triumph Broadside proposal. Image: Driven to Write

The Triumph TR7 is one of those unfortunate cars that if it hadn’t suffered from bad luck it would have had no luck at all. Created as the former BLMC slid towards bankruptcy and public ownership, its development was bedevilled by financial and regulatory uncertainty. Once in the public gaze its appearance proved divisive, enthusiasts criticising its performance, the lack of a convertible version and ‘soft’ road behaviour. Triumph engineers had remedies for all of these matters, but time and again events would prove the car’s undoing. Continue reading “Sideswipe”

Opening Up the TR7 Envelope

Spot a Triumph TR7 in a car park and you may well experience something rather strange.

triumphtr7-01

Unenlightened passers-by won’t give it a second look, whereas examples of most of its boxy contemporaries would attract their immediate attention. The last of the TRs shares with its Rover SD1 stablemate an ability to blend into the 21^st century carscape, despite originating over forty years ago. Continue reading “Opening Up the TR7 Envelope”

Ashtrays: Triumph TR8

In the Triumph naming system, the TR numbers indicated a new body. Not the TR8.

The ’65-67 TR4a had a four-cylinder 2.1 litre unit. The ’67-68 TR5 had a straight six 2.5 litre unit as did the TR6 which ran to 1976. Then Triumph reverted to a 2.0 litre four with the TR7. Oddly then the TR8 name served to indicate a new engine, the Rover V8 and not a new body. But it’s the disappointing ashtray that we’re here to Continue reading “Ashtrays: Triumph TR8”

Theme : Evolution – A Road To Nowhere?

Is design still evolving? As part of this month’s theme, Driven to Write republishes a post from the beginning of last year

Does Car Design Have a Future?

Car design is usually late to the party. This isn’t because designers aren’t up to it – consider the bold output of the Bauhaus in the 1920s and 30s, when run by Walter Gropius, then consider his rather conventional design for an Adler car of the same period. It wasn’t until the late 1990s that critics felt that a car, an Audi, deserved the Bauhaus soubriquet.

Compare 50s modernist and brutalist buildings with the florid vehicles produced then. Cars did vaguely get round to Continue reading “Theme : Evolution – A Road To Nowhere?”