1968 Triumph goes from pricey to priceless
Tony and his wife, Mary Anne, have driven their 1968 Triumph TR250 since their days at the University of San Francisco. They own Patterson's Irish Pub in Mendocino.
When most couples traded in their college sports car for a minivan and a child's car seat, we kept our sports car under a tarp and dragged it around from place to place. After 35 years of being in the courtroom, we decided to hang up our "legal briefs" for a Guinness and the life of "publicans" (pub owners) in the tiny coastal Northern California town of Mendocino. On warm sunny days, tourists "ooh" and "ahh" when they see the TR250 parked in front of Patterson's Pub next to a 1955 Beardmore London taxi.
The TR series of sports cars grew from the modest origins of an essentially pre-war saloon-car chassis with a "torquey engine" destined to power a farm tractor. To say that this is an oversimplification is an understatement, yet this is how the prototype was basically cobbled together in early 1952. In competition with Jaguar, MG and Morgan, Sir John Black's TR became a major hit in the British export market to the United States. Throughout the 1960s the company was in serious financial difficulty, and had it not been for the Leyland Group takeover in 1961, there may well have been no subsequent TRs. Although the TR's handling had been modernized with independent rear suspension, the engineers were still left with the car's relative "lack of surge." By 1967 a 2.5-litre six-cylinder engine was developed, and when fitted with Lucas fuel injection the car now produced 150 horsepower. Emissions legislation in the Unites States meant that the TR250 had to have twin carburetors rather than fuel injection.
The following is taken from the original 1968 brochure that is still in our glove box: Triumph's TR-250 is a true sports car in the classic sense, yielding to the driver all of the fun of being the pilot, the feel of the road, and the maneuverability and handling qualities that mean sports car. The 2 1/2 liter, 6 cylinder engine moves right out of the lower gears, and takes the car along effortlessly at higher turnpike cruising speeds.
Called TR5 in Britain (fuel injected) and TR250 in the US (twin carburetors), this new engine overpowered the MGB, Triumph's deadly rival. In 1967 Road & Track magazine got its hands on a TR250 and suggested that the "TR had undergone a personality change, and that this popular sports car is thereby refined and improved in almost every way ... the engine is in a very mild state of tune and could hardly run more sweetly." The quoted top speed was 107 mph versus the MG at 90mph.
After production of 2,500 TR 250's, the production line gave way to the TR6 which had the same chassis despite a major facelift. Our TR250 cost us $3,100, which was a fortune for us in 1968. The cost of having Mark Singleton of British European in Sonoma County restore it in 2008 - for an eventual first-place finish at the All British Motorcar Show - was priceless.
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