Our Cars: Triumph GT6

I’m sure that Tom wouldn’t mind me describing him as a mature purveyor in the black arts of carburettor tuning. I met him twice before consigning Trixie for five days and my impressions were all good. With just 450 miles on the clock, she was running rich, but Airey credited my brother and I doing ‘a pretty good job’ in setting the 2.6-litre, six-cylinder engine up by ear and the Weber manual.

I delivered the old car brimming with super unleaded and Tom poured in a bottle of octane booster for good measure. For those who’ve never witnessed their pride and joy strapped down onto a rolling road, singing its heart out, accompanied by a chorus of whooshing fans and blinking read outs, well, let’s just say it’s not easy to witness.

Airey made me run her up twice on delivery, just to see what he was up against (and maybe to check my confidence in the engine). Either way, I felt I was delivering my car into good hands.

‘Good,’ he said when the engine came back to idle. ‘You get going and I’ll ring when we’re done.’

He’s got a drawing on his desk with a pyramid of qualifications and skills like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. It starts with a high-school diploma at the bottom, runs through associates, bachelors and masters degrees then a PhD before the very tip marked: ‘people who can still tune carburettors’.

‘I’ve got a customer who has all of those, except the bit at the end,’ says Airey.

The results? Well this is a young and tight engine, and Airey wasn’t about to rev it to the skies especially as the conversion from standard 2-litre to 2.6-litre TR6 power mainly involves a stroked crankshaft which increases the torque, but doesn’t lend itself to mad over revving. He handed over the bill with the figures written on the side: 175bhp at 5800rpm.

‘It was climbing all the time, but running an engine in on a rolling road is bad practice,’ said Airey. ‘You need to get out and drive it, use the revs and don’t labour it. I think there’s probably between 15 and 20bhp to come.’

Which would get this hand-built engine close to brother William’s guesstimate of 200bhp and, with a kerbweight of 850kg, give a power-to-weight ratio of around 230bhp per tonne; not bad for an old bathtub head ‘six’.

The journey home was a delight. Responsive, powerful, with a lovely growl through the wide-bore exhaust, the little Triumph a charmer to drive, though weirdly geared and lively at the rear end at the moment as I haven’t had a dry day let alone a weekend to start the rebuild of the rear end. It’s all there, modified, powder-coated and lovely in a huge plastic crate, with Tom Cox’s rebuilt racing differential unit just returned to my care, but it’s a big job. Nothing goes in a straightforward manner when it comes to old cars and if you are doing it yourself, there’s never enough time.

Of course there are issues: the exhaust touches somewhere, the oil catch tank has yet to be fitted as my lovely engineer friend Pete Collet has yet to create a bracket for the thing, and I still need to fit his beautifully fabricated drip tray/heat shield for the Webers. Bracketry is the scourge of a decent restoration and it takes forever, which is why professionally built restomods cost so much money.

One thing I have fitted is the Le Mans wheels fresh from the paint shop. These distinctive disc-style alloys were first used by the Triumph Spitfire Le Mans team in 1965 when they were painted white. You can’t buy them anymore and even if you could, you probably wouldn’t want a set on your car since they were magnesium alloy which corrodes like a bugger. Fortunately, Mark Field of Jigsaw Racing had a modest number of these wheels recreated by Compomotive of Telford, Shropshire, in aluminium alloy. They’re still rare, though, and after much nagging he agreed to sell me a used set which had come back from a lady whose family had bought them for her Triumph Herald – unbelievably she didn’t like them.

I had them blasted and checked, and powder coated in a distinctive gun-metal grey and think they look very fine indeed, although I’m going to have to relieve the wheel arches front and rear as the extra width means the Pirelli Cinturatos rub against the inside of the wings. As I said, nothing’s simple in the restomod game…

I never met Robert ‘Kas’ Kastner, Triumph tuner extraordinaire, who died in 2021, but I did meet Bob Tullius, his one-time principal driver, sworn rival and motorsport legend, who died on 16 March at the age of 95. He was blunt but polite, and a very good raconteur. Most will remember Tullius for his Group 44 Jaguars from V12 E-Types to the two XJR-5 entries in the 1984 Le Mans 24 Hours. But he was also heavily involved with Triumph’s competition efforts with TRs and GT6s.

In 1972 Tullius and Kastner went head-to-head as Triumph-backed joint SCCA entries with GT6 models campaigned in the D production class. Triumph had cunningly backed both teams: Kastner-Brophy Racing would concentrate its efforts in the West Coast races, and Group 44 in the East Coast events.

Both teams met, however, in what was known as the Runoffs in the end-of-the-season American Road Racing Championships, where top drivers chosen by the SCCA competed for a single honour. Driver Brian Furstenau in the Group 44 car competed with Don Devendorf in the Kastner-Brophy car, though in the end, it was Bob McQueen in a former Brock Racing Enterprises Datsun 2000 who won with Furstenau second and the Kastner car retired after an off.

Despite his team victory, Tullius always felt that Group 44 got the wrong end of the stick when it came to the special Triumph tuning parts to make the GT6 sing and that Kastner’s previous job as Director of Motorsports for Triumph in the US gave him privileges not available to Tullius. For all that, Tullius could make a six-cylinder Standard engine work well, especially in a TR6, which Group 44 campaigned for some years. Tullius always said that the car, which he owned and drove for many years, was the most fun car he had ever driven.