Triumph Spitfire Books and Sources

The pill beside a source grades the kind of source it is, not every line in it, and there are four. Primary sources were made at the time, by the maker or by people who were there, or are the records of the archive that keeps the factory's papers, at the British Motor Museum; a later recollection, even by someone who was there, is Reference, and so is a firm's account of a car it owns. Motor Sport's road tests and race reports, written while the cars were new, are primary, and so are Standard-Triumph's and British Leyland's brochures and the British Motor Museum's record of the last car. Reference sources are later work done with care: the clubs' histories, the archive of Canley Classics, a Triumph specialist, the specialist magazines, and the catalogues of parts suppliers, which are cited only for what a catalogue states. Database sources, such as racingsportscars' race results and IMCDb's list of the car's film and television appearances, are read one entry at a time.

Unchecked covers encyclopaedias and enthusiasts' sites, chiefly Wikipedia and triumphspitfire.com, a detailed reference site that seldom names its sources and sometimes contradicts itself; forums, blogs and sources seen only in part, such as the Revs Institute's photograph captions, read as search snippets, are Unchecked too. All are useful leads, so a page may use one, but only alongside a stronger source, naming it in the sentence, or with its figure marked Unchecked. A good source can still be wrong on one point. The Dutch Triumph Spitfire Club is reliable on its own history and on the cars sold in the Netherlands, yet it says that every model could be had with wire wheels, and the British brochure for the 1500 of December 1978 lists none; the page on hardtops and options says so.⁠source 2​source 3​source 4​source 5​source 6​source 7​source 8​source 9​source 10​source 11

On the other pages, small numbered marks at the end of a section show which sources it rests on. Each mark leads to the list at the foot of that page, where the sources are numbered by first use on that page, so one source can carry a different number from page to page. After a source's name comes where to look in it, when the page gives one: a page number, a table, a section or a caption, such as "p. 84" in Practical Classics' buyer's guide or the Spitfire table in Canley Classics' production figures. Here every source the site cites is listed once, with its address printed as plain text rather than as a link.⁠source 12​source 13

Seven sources, or groups of them, carry most of the weight:

Where they disagree, the pages show each reading beside its source. The production figures of the Spitfire 4 and the 1500 are one case: Canley Classics and the Triumph Sports Six Club print different figures for both.⁠source 2​source 14​source 15​source 16​source 17​source 18​source 19​source 13​source 20​source 21​source 10​source 22​source 23​source 24​source 25