In Memory Of The Late Great TVR
So this is probably a little late but I’m a great believer in better late than never. On 12th July this year, it was announced that yet another British motoring firm would no longer be open for business. Although under Russian ownership for some time, the new owner of TVR, Mr Smolensky did promise he would keep TVR British, and I think there were more than a handful of people who wanted him to be successful. Sadly, TVR ceases to exist as a car manufacturer so I thought a look over the firm’s history and its greatest cars was a fitting tribute to yet another lost British motoring firm.
Lotus had Colin Chapman and TVR had Trevor Wilkinson (1923-2008), or TreVoR Wilkinson to explain where the name came from. After building his first car in 1947 which is no longer in existence, Wilkinson teamed up with Jack Pickard to begin TVR Engineering, later renamed the simple TVR that we have come to know today. The company’s first car was launched in 1949 but the first real production car came to the surface in 1954, when the company also received its new name, TVR. The Grantura was the first TVR to sport the glass-reinforced plastic bodywork that TVR has become famous for.
Trevor Wilkinson
This glass-reinforced plastic arrangement won the Americans over and TVR created the chassis for the Jomar Coupe which featured prominently in the United States. These cars were also marketed in the UK with the tagline, ‘Outhandles Everything’. The Jomar was perhaps TVR’s real breakthrough. It became apparent with this car that TVR was about creating the near-perfect chassis if nothing else. The Jomar was used in many racing series’ in the USA and bought TVR to the table as a real player in automotive manufacture. Engines in early TVRs were never more than 2-litre 4-cylinders, usually from Ford and chucking out no more than 100bhp.
TVR Jomar CoupeImage credit: image
Unlike Chapman, Wilkinson only had a short history at the wheel of his creation and left to set up a specialist glass-fibre engineering business in 1962. In the 1960s, TVR innovation very much went to the USA when Jack Griffiths, a car dealer in the States put a 4.7 litre V8 engine from an AC Cobra under the bonnet of his Grantura. Jack discovered that this was a superb idea and distributed his cars in the USA under the model name ‘Griffith’ and they were sold by TVR in the UK as, you’ve guessed it, the Griffith and later on as the Tuscan (the 1967 one, not the one you’re thinking of).
TVR-Griffith 4700cc 1965 - Fordwater TrophyImage credit: image
1965 saw the beginning of the Martin Lilley ownership period and the firm returned to Ford for their engines, usually V6s, eventually releasing a new version of the aforementioned Tuscan. There were many models released during the 1970s and then came a big change in the 1980s for TVR. TVR entered the ‘wedge’ era. This isn’t complicated to understand; quite simply, the cars looked like wedges. We’re talking TVR Tasmin, 350 and 450, a different breed of car from the glass-reinforced plastic bunch before them.
The next term of ownership was Peter Wheeler’s in 1981 and a return to glass-reinforced plastic. This term saw TVR move away from the new V6s bought from Ford and towards V8s, as seen in the Griffith. The Rover V8 was the most commonly used and capacity was now up to 3.5 litres. In 1988, a V8 was sourced from Holden of Australia but this arrangement later fell through and the Rover V8 became the favourite. The Rover V8 went through considerable changes to squeeze under the bonnets of subsequent TVR models until the early 90s when it was announced that TVR had designed and created their own engine. It was called the AJP8, a lightweight alloy V8. The idea was to drop this into the Griffith and Chimera but a delay in finishing the engine meant it first appeared in the Cerbera and Tuscan race models.
I think the range of models from the 90s when TVR established itself as one of the respected small-time car makers of the automotive market, is when TVR became a really serious player. It was during this time that Peter Wheeler’s pencil went a bit mad producing some incredible and, if at times, quite scary designs. This was the time of the Chimaera, Griffith, Cerbera, Tuscan, Tamora, T350, Typhon and the absolutely barking-mental Sagaris. Shortly after these cars came to the road, Wheeler created a straight-six derivative of the V8 which would be cheaper to produce and these are the engines seen in the newer models of the above list.
TVR Sagaris
It was in 2004 when TVR’s downfall began, never to return to its previous form. In July of that year, Nicholas Smolensky bought the company for a rumoured £15 million from Wheeler, although this has never actually been confirmed. From here on, it seemed to be all downhill. Production fell from 12 cars to only 4 a week, 300 members of staff were laid off and Wheeler wanted to build a housing estate on the old factory once the lease had expired. The company was therefore forced to move meaning that the Blackpool plant was shut down. Body production and assembly moved to Italy with only engine production remaining in the UK. In protest, TVR owners got together and drove through London in November of 2006 and the event was dubbed ‘London Thunder’. There is a video below of the same event from 2007 demonstrating the superb and, at times, crazy TVR designs that made the brand so famous.
As if all of the above wasn’t enough, Smolensky literally took TVR to pieces creating four separate companies: intellectual property rights which were transferred to a Smolensky company already in existence; TVR Motors – the rights to sell the cars and market them in the UK; TVR Power – the parts and spares portion of the business and Blackpool Automotive which included factory and manufacturing assets. The final company, Blackpool Automotive went into administration at the end of 2006 and a legal battle ensued over who owned which parts of the four businesses and who would be made to pay the redundancy packages to laid-off workers.
At the end of this battle, Smolensky was officially confirmed as the owner (still) and said he intended to sell the business to a partnership who intended to export TVRs to the USA. Smolensky made various statements after including that he was still in control of the business and intended to restart production and that the Sagaris would be re-launched as the Sagaris 2 but this never actually happened. Gullwing, a German manufacturer who had a minor stake in TVR, announced that production would begin in 2010 with a brand new car and that TVR would eventually be making everything – including electric cars. Once again, nothing materialised. Then in May 2011, the TVR website stated they would be constructing the company’s previous models, Griffith to Sagaris and overhauling all TVRs from that era. All would now come with a brand new Chevrolet V8 engine. As expected, nothing more happened and finally, on 12th July 2012, Smolensky announced a permanent end to TVR production stating that costs and customer demand were both too high for the company to turn over a profit. The TVR name will now be used on a new line of portable wind turbines.
Image credit: image
And that was that. The end of TVR. Unbelievably, I was never a massive fan of TVR but I guess you don’t realise what you’ve got until it’s gone and I don’t think there is anyone in the market who can offer genuinely scary and crazily-designed sports cars on the same level as TVR. So I will miss TVR. As Clarkson says of the Sagaris, the final TVR, it’s like a big grizzly bear; good fun until it rips your head off. In a similar way, a bear would probably be very annoying, forever scaring you half to death, destroying things and costing you a lot of money at the same time, much like TVR. But you’d grow to love it and miss it when it’s gone, much like TVR. The interiors were impractical, they weren’t massively reliable and they were occasionally quite dangerous. But they looked pretty damn awesome and delivered good, proper driving fun. And really, that’s all that matters. RIP TVR.