I have been thinking again, why is it that women cannot put on mascara without closing their mouths? Why, if it’s meant to be Alcoholics Anonymous, is the first thing that any attendee does is to stand up and say, “My name is Bob and I’m an alcoholic?” Another question, why is it I have never known anyone who owns a SAAB?  I found this quite odd, and when I started asking my friends, they couldn’t think of anyone in their circle that had one either. This had me wondering, as the company is still in business, and as you see them on the roads, who does actually buy them?  Perhaps it is a demographic I am unaware of, but that said, I have not known anyone who owned a TVR either, and until last year, they were still reported as a going concern.

Well now, my neighbour has gone and spoilt it all with the recent acquisition of a SAAB 93 estate. With the arrival of this car, little did I expect that my other statement was going to go belly up, as I was seriously either going to buy a SAAB or a TVR.

I have been involved with a few TVR owners, this being through Ride Drive of course, but actual ownership, well no of course not. For a start they are expensive and unreliable, according to Clarkson, as after all he is the expert, and if anyone should know, Jeremy should. He always comes out with the usual ‘always breaking down’ comment at every opportunity, so there must be some truth in it.  He never utters this view whilst testing one though, and he was certainly raving about the Sagaris on the Dave TV channel the other week, and without any reliability issues being mentioned.  Anyway, I digress.

It was whilst meeting up with some of these TVR owning folk that I realised none of them were smoking pipes, nor were they banging on about reliability or cost of ownership. No, in fact they were just talking about driving the cars.  I did try to catch them out with a few pointed questions, but try as I might, I could not shift them. Perhaps I was onto something here, as it may be that TVR’s are more reliable than has been suggested elsewhere.

Are they expensive to service? After some research I found that it would cost less than my VW. Okay, let’s try again, ‘With the factory closed, can you get parts?’ All of the official dealerships are now independents and there are plenty of various experts out there. Many of the TVR parts come from major manufacturers anyway. A company called Multipart are now on board making spares galore and apparently parts are actually better now than when TVR as a company was trading.

With my mind turning over, much stroking of chin and dreaming commenced, as my perceived problem was of how do I sell this to my Significant Other?  Well as it happens I didn’t have to try that hard. Good girl, back of the net!

Now all I had to do was I just had to find one, and with plenty of advice freely given by the TVR owners I had met, the search commenced, and with my search coming to fruition last year with a purchase being made.

During my last two pieces for the Ride Drive website I was rumbling around the Cotswolds in a Jensen Interceptor, and then an Alfa-Romeo Spider. An American V8 engine powers the Jensen, and the Alfa is a sports convertible, so this month I thought I would tie these two factors together in the one vehicle, the TVR Griffith 500, a sports convertible actually powered by an American V8.  To understand why TVR produced this car we have to go back some years and cross the pond to explain the big engine sports car concept.

In the late 1950’s American engine designers had turned to Aluminium for their engine castings, as this provided greater efficiency as well as having weight advantages. Buick was one such company taking this route and one of the engines they had been producing was a 3.5 litre V8, which they named as The Fireball.

A little later, when Rover was looking at replacing their heavy straight six unit, as used for powering their executive cars of the 1960’s, by sheer chance Rover’s then managing director, William Martin-Hurst, came upon The Fireball in an American boatyard.  At that time, Buick, now General Motors, was phasing out The Fireball, and in 1965, Martin-Hurst managed to buy the rights for production of the engine.

Fitted to the Rover saloon cars of the day, this was seen as an ideal engine for the soon to be launched Range Rover, in which it turned out to be a great success. So versatile did it prove to me that throughout time the engine has been used to power cars from MG, Triumph, Morgan, and Marcos, to name but a few, and that was apart from its time in the Rover SD1. So how did TVR get use of this British Leyland (BL) gem?

Very simply, the new TVR Tasmin of the day has been built using the Ford Essex/Cologne V6 unit, as found in the Granadas and Capris of the time. However, as TVR in those days actually exported their products, they were finding it difficult to get their cars into Middle Eastern countries, as the Ford engine was perceived there as being American; and I guess that would have been just about as welcome as the arrival of Heather Mills at a Wings reunion.

When TVR asked BL if they had an engine they could use, they found them willing to supply them with their Rover V8 lump. In fact, BL were struggling to use the engine at this point, owing to the poor sales performance of the Rover SD1. This meant the engine was in TVR hands by the early 1980’s, and went on to be used in various TVR models in its ‘breathed on’ 3.9, 4.0, 4.2 or 4.5 litre form, in the S-series as well as the Tasmin/Wedge derivatives.

As time moved on, and as wedge shapes for cars were seen as old hat, a new model was needed to keep TVR up to date.  The Griffith prototype was launched on an unsuspecting public at the 1990 motor show and such was the interest, the car just had to be made. Remember, this was a company that had been producing cars with sharp edges up until now, and the new sleek and curvaceous Griffith just blew the public away.

The Griffith was officially launched in late 1991 and took its name after Jack Griffith, an American importer of TVR’s in the ‘60s.  This was a man who put larger engines in TVR Grantura models for the stateside market and then simply called it a Griffith.

The new TVR Griffith was sold with either a 4.0 or 4.3litre Rover V8 engine form (240/280bhp), and in 1992 it would set you back the thick end of £30k. The initial show car was based on the chassis of the V8 version of the S-series, but the production road car came out with one derived from a Tuscan race car. Journalists of the day raved about the new Griff.  ‘So close to greatness it hurts,’ was how Autocar summed it up.  Performance Car magazine needed less print, as the heading, “Wow” was simply stated for their write-up. "They're loud, punk rock uncouth and who gives a damn" was the comment by Clarkson, in his later Performance Car magazine article of 1993.

It was in the same year, 1993, that the 5-litre version was announced, with the promise of 340bhp and upgrades to the brakes and suspension.  The engines were supplied through Land Rover at Solihull before making the short trip to TVR engine specialists, TVR Power, in Coventry. By the time the 5-litre was launched very little of the original Rover engine remained as standard, and having been properly sorted, the engines travelled to the Bristol Avenue factory in Blackpool for their final fitment.

Most will know that the car is made from fibre glass, the matting being laid in layers within a mould and left to cure, but some will not realise the work involved in the chassis. Using mild steel tubing, some 47-yards of it were cut, formed and welded into what is a thing of beauty, when you see it in the flesh. So, after all that craftsmanship has taken place, what do you end up with on the road? Well, for a start you do not get ABS, nor do you get air bags, and you can forget about electronic stability programs, because there are none of those either. When asked about this, then owner of TVR, Peter Wheeler, said something along the lines of ‘building cars for men and not for …..’ Well, anyway you get his drift!