How Just One Mistake Destroyed Britain's Most Infamous Car (Triumph Stag)
METTLE
4,264 views
Read the first chapter of How Britain Stopped Making Things free: https://mettlehistory.co.uk
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If you were driving in Britain in the seventies, you knew a Triumph Stag when one came past you. The long flat bonnet. The bar across the roof, which the factory put there to stop the body flexing.
Underneath it Triumph had put a V8 of its own design and manufacture. Three litres, four seats, a roof that folded away, and a waiting list twelve months long.
Within a few years the car had acquired a nickname, and men who had waited a year for one were standing on the verge with the bonnet up and the temperature needle hard against the stop.
In another building of the same corporation there was already a V8 that worked, and a man who could have put it in this car, and the Stag went to its grave without it.
The whole thing started as a favour. A spare saloon, lent to a designer in Turin who had not been asked to build anything.
6 Comments
The disaster that Triumph built smashing two Triumph 4 cylinder engines together to create a V8 was flawed in every way from the outset, it ran hot, warped the cylinder heads and failed in a costly breakdown.
How Just One Mistake Destroyed Britain's Most Infamous Car (Triumph Stag)
METTLE
4,264 views
Read the first chapter of How Britain Stopped Making Things free: https://mettlehistory.co.uk
-----------------
If you were driving in Britain in the seventies, you knew a Triumph Stag when one came past you. The long flat bonnet. The bar across the roof, which the factory put there to stop the body flexing.
Underneath it Triumph had put a V8 of its own design and manufacture. Three litres, four seats, a roof that folded away, and a waiting list twelve months long.
Within a few years the car had acquired a nickname, and men who had waited a year for one were standing on the verge with the bonnet up and the temperature needle hard against the stop.
In another building of the same corporation there was already a V8 that worked, and a man who could have put it in this car, and the Stag went to its grave without it.
The whole thing started as a favour. A spare saloon, lent to a designer in Turin who had not been asked to build anything.