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The Death of Triumph

To: british-cars@autox.team.net (British Cars Mailing List)
Subject: The Death of Triumph
From: "Gregory T. Fieldson" <krikor@jhunix.hcf.jhu.edu>
Date: Tue, 31 Aug 1993 16:23:17 -0400
The Death of British Autos:

I don't know that I could agree that re-engineering was the 
death of Triumph.  I think that marketing and bad management
practice would be a better description.  I recently purchased 
(and read) Graham Robson's "The Racing Triumphs" which is a 
history of Triumph racing.  In the book there are many things 
which might predict the death of the Triumph marque, given its 
behavior in motorsports.  They are a kind of litany of bad 
corporate practice.

Lack of flexibility.  When Triumph's racing program was re-
started after a brief death in the early sixties, the group 
was assembled as part of the Engineering department, with 
staff drawn from the various parts of the engineering and 
production branches.  Work rules assigned specific tasks to 
laborers from specific branches. "If I told the wrong fellow 
to pick up a spanner, I could have caused a work stoppage at 
the entire plant."  Not being completely lost,(that happened 
in the 70's) a solution was obtained by reorganizing the racing 
program into a "performance tuning" group which was part of 
the Service department.  Repair mechanics were allowed to work 
on any part of the car.

Lack of feedback.  The Triumph factory always (and only) 
supported rally cars, not road-racers, yet it was noted that 
the TR7s were always dominant in those rallies with a road 
course bias.  Most earlier Triumphs had this bias as well.  
Yet the factory never made any attempts to move to road racing, 
even when private teams, like Kas Kastner (who received luke-
warm support at some times) proved that the Triumphs were 
competitive road-racers.

Bad personnel management.  Triumph repeatedly managed to 
alienate their better drivers in Europe.  Even worse, I think
was the regard for the Americans like Kas Kastner, who were 
actually able to win with Triumphs (unlike the factory).  
Kastner was able to obtain perhaps 15-20% more power out of 
Triumph engines than the factory race preparers.  The factory 
engineers didn't believe it, preferring to think that he was 
exaggerating.  They didn't bother to actually test his engines 
themselves until shortly before the TR6 and the GT6 were retired 
from factory racing.  Kastner, if I read Robson properly, 
does not particularly think kindly of the Triumph support
for racing, or their appreciation of what he did for their
American sales and image.

Inter-organizational distrust.  The Triumph performance tuning 
program was run from the Abingdon factory, and the folks in 
Coventry never trusted them.  Thus they never had much in the
way of cooperation of projects, or even help with ideas.  Of
course the folks in Abingdon viewed them as outsiders as well.

Laziness.  Triumph never made an effort to homologate
performance parts or special racing kits, even though doing 
so was a matter of paper work more than anything else.  Triumph 
also didn't bother to build things on time.  The TR8 is 
probably the best example of this.  The car  (actually a 
TR7 V8) was announced as the factory race car about 10 months 
before it appeared in a race.  The components of the car were 
all available, it just didn't get built and tested.


In a sense, Triumph deserved to die as it did.  It's a shame
because no one else was building cars for the roadster market, so
those of us who want roadsters were stuck for most of the 80's.
Only the continued survival of the Alfa Spider, proved that the 
market niche really existed (until the Miata appeared..)

Greg F.
(Who gets pretty steamed over the fact that when he was finally 
old enough to drive, muscle cars were long dead, American luxury
yachts had shrunk, and roadsters had just disappeared)


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