Triumph Spitfire History

Standard-Triumph made its cars at Canley, Coventry. Its Triumph Herald, launched at the Royal Albert Hall in London on 22 April 1959, was built on a separate backbone chassis, so that one frame could carry a range of bodies, and Michelotti had styled it. AROnline traces the frame to a supply problem: BMC had bought Fisher & Ludlow, Standard-Triumph's body maker, in 1953, and its bodies would stop once the contracts ran out, so the engineers' answer was a chassis to which smaller firms' panels could be fitted. In time the same platform carried the Vitesse, the Spitfire and the GT6 as well.

Nothing in the range answered the Austin-Healey Sprite. The Herald was a family car, and in the American showrooms, by Graham Robson's account, the TR3A was Triumph's only sports car in 1961.

Robson's account of the company describes one that had planned for growth. The planners of its managing director, Alick Dick, expected to build more than 220,000 cars a year and ordered a £2.5 million assembly hall, due in 1960. Then a government credit squeeze turned profit into loss: by Robson's account the company was then losing about £600,000 a month, and Herald production was cut to three days a week.

Leyland Motors rescued it. Leyland's bid came at the end of 1960 and it took control during 1961. Robson records that three months after the takeover Dick and six of his board colleagues were dismissed and 800 staff went; healthy profits returned only in 1962.⁠source 7​source 8​source 1​source 9​source 2​source 3

The Spitfire was Harry Webster's idea. He ran Standard-Triumph's engineering, as director of engineering from 1957 (Robson dates his time in charge from 1956), and he wanted to get more from the Herald and to give the company a rival to the Austin-Healey Sprite. Michelotti, who had styled the Herald and the TR4 for him, drew the car. Robson puts it from Webster's side:

The prototype was code-named Bomb. TRaction, a club magazine, dates the start of its construction to September 1960, in Michelotti's studio in Turin, on the chassis of a 948 cc Herald.

A date of 1957, often repeated for the Spitfire's styling, has no source behind it. Michelotti's first work for Triumph, a TR3 Speciale shown at Geneva, dates from that year, which may be the source of the confusion.⁠source 1​source 3​source 10​source 8​source 4​source 9

Then the money ran out. Robson writes that Standard's financial collapse meant the car had to be stored under a dust sheet, and that it was Webster's powers of persuasion that won Leyland's approval for it, the first of many new projects. Others tell it as a discovery.

One account, Lancaster Insurance's history of the car, names the executive as Stanley Markland, the newly appointed managing director, who removed the cover, sat in the car and ordered it into production. However it happened, the go-ahead is dated 13 July 1961.

What followed was fast. Webster's deputy, John Lloyd, later told Robson that they took Bomb from prototype to production car in 15 months, which matches the time from the go-ahead to the London Motor Show of October 1962.⁠source 1​source 4​source 3

The Spitfire 4 was shown at the London Motor Show at Earls Court in October 1962, and Canley built it from that month. The 4 stood for its four cylinders. Lancaster Insurance's history says Standard-Triumph took £6 million of orders by the end of the show.

It was engineering by subtraction. The Herald's backbone chassis was shortened and lost its outer rails and rear outriggers, and the body's structural sills (rocker panels) gave back the stiffness. The engine, gearbox (transmission), steering and swing-axle rear suspension were the Herald's, and so was the way the whole bonnet (hood) and front wings (fenders) tipped forward in one piece. The engine breathed through twin SU carburettors, and the car had front disc brakes and rack-and-pinion steering.

Against the Austin-Healey Sprite and the MG Midget it offered two things a buyer could see at once: wind-up windows and exterior door handles, which the Sprite and Midget of the day lacked. Writing about the American market, Graham Robson said that it began at once to outsell the Sprite and Midget combined and went on doing so for 17 years; triumphspitfire.com says instead that it outsold the Midget every year but one. Neither cites a sales table.

How the name was chosen is not recorded. Lancaster Insurance's history suggests the name was probably Donald Stokes's choice. A story repeated on triumphspitfire.com, and told as a legend in Moss Motoring, has Vickers offering Standard-Triumph one of its aircraft names in return for the name Vanguard. The link with the wartime fighter is the maker's own: British Leyland's US advertising for the 1973 model year said the car honoured the plane that saved Britain.

By April 1963 the price had come down, after purchase tax on new cars was cut to 25% late in 1962. Overdrive was offered from October 1963, for the 1964 model year, and wire wheels and a factory hardtop came for the same model year. Bill Boddy, testing the car for Motor Sport in April 1963, found mild understeer that turned to oversteer as the swing axle took on positive camber, a trait the car kept until 1970. His verdict:

A month after the launch, Lloyd recalled, he and Webster took two Spitfires to the Turin show and were stuck in snow on the Mont Cenis pass.⁠source 5​source 3​source 11​source 9​source 8​source 12​source 13​source 14​source 15​source 16​source 17​source 18​source 19​source 20​source 1

Webster wanted Triumph back at Le Mans on his own terms. A colleague told Robson that Webster got the money from Stanley Markland and chose the Spitfire, and his engineer Ray Bates made its engine give about 100 reliable horsepower with a prototype eight-port cylinder head. Four aluminium-and-glass-fibre fastbacks were built in the experimental department and registered ADU 1B to ADU 4B.

Three started at Le Mans in 1964 and one finished, David Hobbs and Rob Slotemaker's No. 50: 21st overall, and 4th of the prototypes up to 3 litres as racingsportscars groups them. In 1965 they did better. No. 60, ADU 4B, driven by Jean-Jacques Thuner and Simo Lampinen, won the 1.15-litre GT class and finished 13th overall, and No. 54 was 2nd in class and 14th overall.

The rally cars were production-based steel cars with aluminium panels. Their best results came in the same two seasons: Rob Slotemaker and Terry Hunter won the GT class for cars up to 1,300 cc on the 1964 Tour de France and finished 15th overall; Hunter was 2nd overall on the 1964 Geneva Rally; and works Spitfires took 1st and 2nd places in the Prototype category of the 1965 Coupe des Alpes.

The works programme ended after 1965, and Bill Bradley kept the circuit cars racing with factory help into 1966 and 1967. The whole competition story, car by car, is on the racing page.⁠source 1​source 21​source 22​source 23​source 24​source 25​source 26​source 27​source 28​source 29​source 30​source 31

The Spitfire 4 Mk II went into production in December 1964 and was launched in March 1965. It was a development, not a new car. A new camshaft and a four-branch exhaust manifold gave more power, a diaphragm-spring clutch reduced the pedal effort, and the cabin gained better seats, moulded carpets in place of rubber mats and trim over the bare metal. A grille of horizontal bars told it apart.

In 1966 the chassis found a second use, and the Spitfire a sister. The GT6, built from July 1966, put the six-cylinder engine of the Triumph Vitesse into a fastback coupé on the Spitfire's chassis, and Robson ties it to the works fastbacks. Motor Sport, reporting its debut at Earls Court that October, thought it had been a long time coming:

The first GT6s were reserved for export, and British buyers, the same report said, would have to wait until the spring. It was a separate model, not a version of the Spitfire; its production, and the Bond Equipe, a cousin on the Herald's chassis, are on in culture.⁠source 5​source 18​source 19​source 11​source 8​source 32

The Mk III, built from January 1967 and introduced that March, was the first big change. Its engine was bigger, with an eight-port head related to that of Triumph's front-drive 1300 saloon (sedan). Its front bumper rose to cross the middle of the grille, a change made for American safety legislation, and a folding hood (soft top) that stayed on the car replaced the old removable frame. Its power was quoted as a gross figure, a detail that matters to the Mk IV's story.

The United States was the Spitfire's biggest market: Classic & Sports Car puts the US share at 80%. Cars for the US were built to federal safety and emission rules from the 1968 model year, according to AROnline; from the 1969 model year, by the Vintage Triumph Register's account, they carried their instruments in front of the driver, and for the 1970 model year most had a single Zenith-Stromberg carburettor and a bonnet badge set over an RAF roundel. The US cars are covered on North American Spitfires.

In 1968 Leyland became British Leyland, which, Robson notes, put both Triumph and MG, and so the Spitfire and the Midget, under Lord Stokes. Webster moved to Longbridge, as technical director of Austin-Morris from 1969, and Spen King took his place at Triumph. Mk III production ended in December 1970.⁠source 5​source 19​source 18​source 11​source 33​source 9​source 34​source 6​source 8​source 1​source 10

Michelotti restyled the car for the 1970s. The Mk IV, announced in October 1970 and built from November, had a cut-off tail like the Triumph Stag's, a smoother bonnet, flared wheel arches and recessed door handles; the Triumph Sports Six Club says only the sills and door skins were carried over.

The restyle came as the Spitfire's parent bowed out. Motor Sport reported that the Toledo and Triumph 1500 saloons of autumn 1970 brought "the death of the Herald and its variants", and the last Heralds were built in 1971; the Spitfire, in AROnline's words, "outlasted its parent car by nine years".

Underneath, it dealt at last with the swing axle. The new "swing spring" clamped only the bottom leaf of the transverse rear spring to the differential and let the upper leaves pivot, and with a stiffer front anti-roll bar it tamed the tuck-under of the earlier cars. Canley Classics says Triumph had worked the idea out in the 1960s but judged it too expensive. The gearbox gained synchromesh on first, and the instruments moved in front of the driver. Its quoted power was lower than the Mk III's, and it has been called detuned ever since; the Mk IV's own page explains why that is mostly a myth.

The American market soon had its own Spitfire. From the 1973 model year, US cars took the longer-stroke engine of the coming 1500 in the Mk IV body and were sold as the Spitfire 1500, while the rest of the world kept the Mk IV's engine until late 1974. In 1973 the rear track was widened for every market and a wood dashboard arrived, with a front spoiler for 1974.⁠source 5​source 9​source 18​source 35​source 7​source 36​source 37​source 38​source 6​source 39​source 40​source 41

From late 1974 (December, in Canley Classics' table) every Spitfire had the longer-stroke engine, and the car became the Spitfire 1500. The MG Midget received the same engine in the same year, so the old rivals now shared a power unit. With the GT6 dropped at the end of 1973, Robson notes, the Spitfire carried on alone.

In Europe the 1500 kept the Mk IV's looks, which Clive Richardson counted a blessing:

In America it did suffer. US cars wore large rubber overriders (bumper guards) from the mid-1970s and black rubber bumpers for the 1979 and 1980 model years, and their engines, with lower compression and a single carburettor, were detuned. Robson saw the American rules wearing the car down: to pay for them, prices had to rise while performance fell. At home the changes were details, among them TR7-type column stalks and houndstooth seat cloth in early 1977, and a laminated windscreen (windshield) as standard from 1978.⁠source 5​source 42​source 19​source 8​source 40​source 39​source 6​source 43

British Leyland ended car production at Canley in 1980. Motor reported on 6 September 1980, as quoted by Driven To Write, that Triumph production there had ended, and that the Spitfire and the Dolomite would be phased out of the range. The last Spitfire was built there in August 1980.

It was a yellow 1500 with a hardtop (Inca Yellow, according to triumphspitfire.com). The British Motor Museum keeps it, and its record calls it the last one. Why the line ended depends on who tells it. This is the Vintage Triumph Register's verdict:

Classic & Sports Car adds that, like the Midget, it lived on because British Leyland could not replace it.⁠source 44​source 5​source 6​source 45​source 16​source 9

British Leyland had tried, and the first attempt was MG's. AROnline reports that in mid-1969 the engineers at Abingdon began work on ADO21, a mid-engined sports car meant "to replace the MG Midget (and Triumph Spitfire)", though its larger engines soon moved it towards the MGB's class. The company's management viewed a full-size model on 3 November 1970, and the minutes of that meeting, as AROnline quotes them, stopped the work "in view of the Corporate Sports Car Policy"; the project made way, AROnline says, for the car that became the Triumph TR7.

The Spitfire appears in British Leyland's plans once more. AROnline reports that earlier, undated product-strategy documents proposed a sports car, SC1, that "would have come in two body sizes to replace the Spitfire/Midget as well as the MGB/TR7". In the product plan for 1979–87 that AROnline reproduces, SC1 had become a single car, the Broadside, meant to replace the TR7 and the MGB, and the sports-car line held one entry for the Spitfire, for the autumn of 1980: "Spitfire model run out". In AROnline's summary, the Spitfire and the MG Midget were to go unreplaced. The Broadside never went into production either.

MG's next all-new sports car was the MGF, in 1995. Motor Sport, testing it the next year, wrote of "the 33-year gap between the launch of the MGB and that of the MGF", and gave Mazda's MX-5 the credit for having brought the reasonably priced, real sports car back, in modern form, six years before.

Motor Sport saw at once whom the Spitfire was for. Driving the first two cars off the production line for its November 1962 issue, it called the car "a new small-capacity sports car to challenge the Sprite and Midget market", dearer than the Midget but with a "more advanced specification" that might "sway those enthusiasts who are tired of the rigid axle". In the same issue it priced the field: Sprites and Midgets "well under £700", the new MGB under £1,000, and the Spitfire between them.

Bill Boddy, who tested the Spitfire and the Midget for the magazine in 1963, found that the Midget's sliding sidescreens, missing door handles and manually cancelled indicators made "a price of £42 below that charged for the Triumph seem disadvantageously disproportionate", and the magazine's review of the year recalled that the Midget had at first "seemed cramped and a bit old-fashioned, after the Spitfire". In 1967 Mike Cotton linked the move of both British makers up a class, to engines under 1,300 cc, with the arrival of Fiat's and Honda's sports cars "in the 800-850-c.c. category". That August, Boddy found the Spitfire £62 cheaper than the Honda S800, the Sprite and Midget on average £101 cheaper and an MGB £140 dearer. Motor compared the Spitfire, the Honda and the Sprite in October 1967, but that test has not been read, and no source read gives the Fiat 850 Spider's British price or tests it beside the Spitfire.

The table gives the rivals as Motor Sport tested or priced them, each at one date and each figure labelled as the magazine labelled it. Purchase tax was cut late in 1962, so the 1963 prices cannot be set against those of the launch. The Spitfire's own figures are in the specifications on its version pages, and specifications sets them side by side.

When the Mk IV was shown to the press in the autumn of 1970, Motor Sport's J. W. noted that the Spitfire now had synchromesh on all its forward gears, "while the Sprite and Midget do without", and summed up the drive:

In America in 1971, by AROnline's figures, an MGB cost $2,875 and a TR6 $3,275, and the Spitfire less than either. In Britain in October 1975, Motor Sport priced the MG Midget 1500, which now had the Spitfire's own engine, at £1,649 and the MGB at £2,251, with the Spitfire 1500 between them, and a month later, writing of sports cars, it concluded that "British Leyland have a monopoly, in the inexpensive car field". By the late 1970s, AROnline writes, British Leyland was "almost the only company able to offer an open-top sports car" in the United States and Canada.

On the track the record is mixed. At Le Mans in 1964 the one Spitfire to finish was a place ahead, in its class, of an Austin-Healey Sprite, which racingsportscars lists as a "Sebring Sprite"; at Sebring in 1965 a works MG Midget won the GT class for cars up to 1,300 cc from two Spitfires.

What the sources read cannot give is the count: no reliable source read gives a production total for the Sprite, the Midget, the MGB or the Honda, and none read gives one for the Alpine or the Fairlady. Nor does any source read give the Spitfire's sales year by year, so Robson's claim about the Sprite and Midget, and triumphspitfire.com's, in the Spitfire 4's years above, cannot be checked.⁠source 52​source 53​source 54​source 55​source 14​source 56​source 33​source 57​source 58​source 59​source 60​source 49​source 34​source 61​source 48​source 62​source 63​source 64​source 65​source 23​source 66

Exports mattered from the start. According to a report in Autocar (15 February 1968), as cited by Wikipedia, more than 75% of the first 100,000 had been exported, and 25% of all of them had gone to mainland Europe. The biggest market of all has its own page, North American Spitfires, which covers Canada too.

A tester who tried a tuned Spitfire at Goodwood for Motor Sport's December 1964 issue wrote:

In Italy the distributor in 1966 was Ducati Meccanica of Bologna, as that year's Italian brochure shows. For West Germany the sources read are thin: German Wikipedia gives list prices there from 1963 to 1979, citing Seeliger and Automobil Revue.

Not every Spitfire was finished at Canley. Some went abroad as completely knocked-down kits, to be assembled where import rules favoured local work.

In Belgium, Spitfires were assembled at Mechelen (Malines), in a plant that opened in 1961, according to AROnline, to give Standard-Triumph extra capacity when demand was high. Many of them were sold in the United States, and AROnline adds that "33,000 such Belgian cars had been delivered to the USA by 1973", without saying whether all of them were Spitfires. A news report of June 1974 said the plant, which then employed 200, had been producing "a small number of Triumph Spitfires" and would close that December.

In South Africa, Motor Assemblies in Durban built the Spitfire 4 from July 1963 and the Mk II until 1967. Leykor took over with the Mk III in 1968 and by 1969–70 had brought assembly together at Blackheath, near Cape Town. Local-content rules and import permits kept the numbers small, and the Mk IV, the 1500 and the GT6 were never assembled or sold there.

In Australia, Australian Motor Industries assembled the first three versions alongside its other makes, painting them in its own Dulux colours, and the Standard Triumph Car Club there records that Triumphs assembled from such kits used Australian parts to meet local-content rules. Assembly in Ireland is also reported, but no reliable source confirms it.⁠source 67​source 68​source 69​source 70​source 71​source 34​source 48​source 72​source 11​source 73​source 74

Clubs keep the car going on both sides of the Atlantic. The Triumph Sports Six Club in Britain keeps a register for each version, the Vintage Triumph Register publishes its guide to the car in the United States, and the Triumph Spitfire Club in the Netherlands was founded in 1982. The Vintage Triumph Register calls the supply of parts excellent; parts and specialists has the detail. For a Triumph built from 1946 to 1981, the British Motor Industry Heritage Trust issues a Heritage Certificate from the factory records, with the car's build and despatch dates, and identification explains the numbers it confirms.

The Triumph name passed to BMW, which bought it with the Rover Group in 1994 and kept it when Rover was sold in 2000. The badge was last used on a car in 1984, on the Acclaim saloon.

Two of the story's landmarks are kept. Canley Classics bought ADU 4B, the 1965 class winner and the only Le Mans car to survive complete, in 2004; the British Motor Museum at Gaydon has the last Spitfire.⁠source 18​source 6​source 75​source 76​source 22​source 77​source 78​source 45