‘LeMans Rally car’, by Graham Gay (AUS)

Featured in Wedge Ezine, June 1998

Updated: July 9, 1998 (new pictures, corrected errors because this story is about the LeMans rally car and not OOM512R)

THIS is a sad story ... of crushed ambition, of hope turned to despair, of true British pluck facing the odds, and pettinq its nose bloodied.

Actually,-all that seems a bit grand, when you first see the world's only 20Omph TN8, parked forlorn and looking forgotten, among a few old E-types in various stages of dismemberment. Then you look a bit closer, at the quickly detachable glass-fibre bodywork, swoopy and daring; at the twin-turbo 550 bhp V8 Rover engine beneath the bonnet; the purposeful racing-car cockpit, with roll cage and stark but plentiful instruments. And how acbout that turbo boost gauge ... reading up to 30psil.

But even Odor confessed some shortcomings. He'd have preferred fuel injection to the pair of massive SU carbs fitted; and the Cosworth pistons gave a high compression ratio of 8.3: 1. With a 3,653 cc block, and turbo boost pressure limited by valves to between 1.2 and 1.3 bar, the engine was good for 550 to 600 bhp on full song. Not that it ever stayed there for very long, but this was not always because of the engine's fragility, as we shall see.

From the nucleus of that engine evolved the idea of a Le Mans Triumph TR8, a car which seemed at the time to be 'the ideal vehicle to break the dominance of Le Mans by the continental manufacturers such as Porsche, BMW, Lancia and Renault. Well, it seemed a good idea at the time ...

The brave and hopeful one was fan Harrower, most consistent of the people behind the British Le Mans car. When he began. he was an accountant. Only two years into the project, he had become a director of ADA engineering. the firm who originally undertook the development work. Lots of press articles drummed up lots of interest, and a modicum of financial support, not least of which came from enthusiastic members of the Triumph Owners Club, who chipped in cash and then flocked down to Le Mans in great numbers, only to see their car fail even to reach the first hurdle.

The TR8 was built as a Group Five 'Silhouetteclass' endurance racer, a challenge to the dominant Porsche 935s, and based closely on the TR7. Steel body panels were all removed, with the exception of the roof and scuttle, and the remaining monocoque chassis structure was double-skinned to increase strength. The team resisted the costly temptation of fitting wishbone suspension and the like, and stuck with the Triumph front struts and live rear axle.
Bilstein provided the hydraulic damping, hubs came from a March F-1 car, and the already doubleskinned front strut towers were additionally crossbraced with a removable tubular steel truss running across the top of the engine.

Meanwhile, a full steel tubular roll cage in the cockpit, along with a Corbeau racing seat and a comprehensive array of switches and dials, turned the polite little English sports car into a no-friiis 550-horsepower racer. Even the dash panels were replaced with flimsy lightweight glass-fibre, rattling on their rivets. The noise inside over a 24-hour race must have been exhausting. Luckily, perhaps, nobody ever,had to endure it. Kevlar-reinforced fibre-glass.

Adding, of course, the necessary bulges to accommodate wheels 10in wide up front and 14in at the rear, along with a front air dam, side skirts (the left-hand one containing the oil cooler), and an aerofoil at the rear. This elevated wing started off in 1980 as a real Wright Bros string-and-strut effort, but evolved into the alloyplated Porsche-ish one you see now. Cox also added in fastback flying buttresses to the rear of the cockpit, an element of styling that the basic TR7 badly missed. In the end, the car weighed in at 1,200 kg, meaning that
there was plenty of it.

As the date of Le Mans 1980 loomed large, so too did the problems. Getting a suitable gearbox proved difficult, and imposed delays: a proposed British unit failed to turn up olhen expected, and the team were forced to turn back unwillingly to the brutish four-speed American Muncie Folk-crusher' box. This and a myriad of other delays meant that the car missed its proposed shake-down run at the Silverstone 1,000 km race, and arrived at Le Mans only in the nick of time, never having turned a wheel - nor indeed wheeled a turn - in anger. The anger was still to come.

The British Racing Green Triumph passed through scrutineering without a hitch, to the accompaniment of hearty back-slapping by the TR Owners Club. The car had already sparked keen interest in the British press; at Le Mans, this all-British challenger to the Porsche was received with lots of European neck-strainine. Clucking of tongues and chicking of shutters. It was after all, the first Triumph at Le Mans for 19 years . Certainly the run up to Le Mans had been anything but smooth.

Drivers and Harrower, John Sheldon and John Brindley simply weren't able to go fast enough. The problem was not with themselves, nor even that there was anything essentially wronq with the car. But a number of failures, including faulty wheel castings, conspired with a numbing drive-shaft vibration at 175mph to prevent the car from going any faster than that. And 175mph on the Mulsanne Straight just ain't enough.

Amid many tribulations, the team worked to correct the faults. And they succeeded, too. At the end of practice, the TR8 was timed at 201 mph on the Mulsanne Straight - the only Triumph, surely, to have exceeded 20Omph. But it was all to no avail. The requisite number of laps were not completed at sufficient speed, and the car failed to quality. When the historic Le Mans clock ticked round to 4 pm, to signal the surge of sports cars off on their 24-hour sprint, Britain's brightest hope was not among them.

Sorry to say that the TR8's competition career, or at least its Le Mans career, went downhill, there. To cut a sob story short, a lack of finance despite frenzied and increasinqiv hectoring appeals to British industry by fan Harrower - meant that the TR never did get back to France, and it stayed at home for the occasional appearance in Britain, leaving those infidel Porsches to mop up everywhere, condemned to live out its days as a beautiful might-have-been.

This was not for want of trying. Driver Derek Bell was persuaded to test the car. His quoted comments in the press at the time were kind ... he'd be glad to test the car again, to help with development: he hoped they would find the necessary finance. The little-known story from those at the track-side at the time runs like this: Bell drives the car. he pulls up at the pits, a bystander asks him how it went and receives an hoist reply; the engine needed development, the handling needed development, the car as it stood was not anything like good enough. What Bell may or may not have known that this particular casual bystander was Mr  Moneybags, the potential sponsor for 1981. The money never materialised.

In 1982, the Triumph was entered again for Le Mans, but again ran out of funds before it got there, and at the end of 1983, it was bought by the British Sports Car Centre, in Goldhawk Road, West London. We persuaded them to give the car one last blast before they sold it abroad, or whatever, they will do with it. It was a suggestion that six or seven of its cylinders were happy to go along with.

So while the cars new owners revelled spasmodically in a fairly large proportion of its 550 available bhp,the onlookers were left to dream of the way things might have turned out better.Just as those dedicated triumph clubmen did back in 1980. Thats what this car is best at ..encouraging fantasies. Its just a pity that they dont carry any prizes.

Click on any picture to enlarge!