Triumph

Today's TTAC Throwback is a British treat.

Everybody thinks a Texan chicken farmer was the first to shove a grunty American 8-cylinder engine into a lithe Britsh chassis, but really Caroll Shelby was just one in a long line of builders to riff on that formula. Before WWII, Jensen built cars with Ford V8 power, and Railton used various Hudson chassis along with their superb inline-eight (and six) cylinder engines to build square-rigged hot rods that milord might use to travel quickly to those country house Saturday-through-Monday affairs in which the upper classes indulged.

I’ve been visiting car graveyards since I bought my first hooptie for 50 bucks in the early 1980s, and one thing about American junkyards has remained constant during the following four decades: the presence of 1970s British and Italian sports cars. Maybe they were a bit less weathered in 1987 or 1994 or 2006, but a steady trickle of discarded MGBs, 124 Sport Spiders, X1/9s, Jensen-Healeys, Spitfires, Midgets, and TR7s into U-Wrench yards has flowed at about the same rate throughout. That’s why I wasn’t surprised to discover this allegedly rare 1976 Triumph TR7 Victory Edition in a Denver-area yard last month.

You read the title correctly. There’s a Triumph TR8 for sale in the urbane and international city of Tampa, which is in Florida. Miraculously, the sporty convertible has traveled just 90 miles since 1981.

It’s beige, malaise, and showroom fresh, so let’s have a look.