The rise and fall of TVR – Part two

I should cocoa. This was an explosion of over-powered cars, pros versus amateurs, fantastic tracks, big hair and miniskirts, chest wigs and neanderthals, head-masterly clerks of the course, learning versus experience and all to a late-Eighties sound track drowned out by unsilenced engines. It was fantastic.

Fast Lane magazine was in it up to its neck as Mark Hales could see the appeal and strong-armed editor Peter Dron into getting the magazine involved with a factory-run guest car. He even cajoled the staff to take part: Ryan Baptiste, Simon Arron, Peter Hall and Dron, all emerged shaken and stirred.

As Hales wrote in Fast Lane in May 1989: ‘Dron’s cigarette consumption has doubled to 100 a day, Baptiste has gone quiet, Hales says all the rounds seem to clash with his Firestone Sierra commitments, Arron has yet to think of any plausible excuse and Peter Hall admits pure fear – well at least he’s honest.’

For 16 years and a total of 279 races, the TVR Tuscan Challenge became the best supported and most glamorous one-make series. The list of winners was a litany of the best tin-top and endurance drivers of their generation and as Cooper puts it: ‘that series bought the noisy East End boys and girls into TVR showrooms, along with their bonuses…’

Wheeler loved the racing, initially was a bystander but was soon persuaded to join in. And if there were a few complaints that his car seemed almost unbelievably quick in a straight line as he tried out various special-brew TVR Power engines, they were pleased to see him and the race support that implied. He was never quite fast enough to bother the really quick boys, but Ben Samuelson, former PR and marketing boss recalled a ‘committed overtaker’ in a charming remembrance piece for the TVR Car Club.

‘He once performed a perfect overtaking manoeuvre on me at over 100mph going into Riches at Snetterton,’ he wrote, ‘which would have been slightly more effective if he hadn’t been travelling backwards at the time…’

Halcyon days, but nothing lasts or stands still for long and as Ray Hutton, motoring correspondent for The Sunday Times, observed in the early Nineties: ‘the rest of the motor industry isn’t going to let TVR run free for ever…’

He was right and sporting rivals started to flood into showrooms: Mazda’s MX-5 in 1990, Porsche’s Boxster, BMW’s Z3, Mercedes-Benz’s SLK and Jaguar’s XK-8 all in 1996 and Audi’s TT in 1998. Given that the average gestation of an all-new car was about five years then, most of these sports cars would have been conceived around or just after the birth of the Griffith – coincidence? Maybe.

By the end of the decade, you could have the choice of five or six drophead or coupé sports cars from established manufacturers. None offered the sheer in-your-face performance and noise of a TVR, but they had occupied just about every bit of manoeuvring room for the Blackpool company. Samuelson, though, claims sales were still climbing.

‘Every time a road test pitted a TVR against the Porsche or the SLK, we sold more cars as people saw the car and heard that underdog story,’ he says.

Be that as it may, the warranty claims were starting to tell on the company and its reputation. By this time I’d moved to Auto Express magazine, which had a home above The Daily and Sunday Express in the ‘Grey Lubyanka’ on Blackfriars Bridge. Sue Douglas, the editor of the Sunday drove a Chimaera, which when it was running she’d park outside the building, while several floors above I opened a lot of reader’s letters starting: ‘I’d love a TVR, but…’, or ‘how do I reject my TVR…’.

Giles Cooper admits he needed to hold customers hands through the ownership process, getting out to stranded cars and not making a drama out of a crisis, but not all dealers were equipped or willing to do that. Mind you, those who did complain to the factory could end up with very short shrift from Wheeler.

‘We had one customer making a terrific fuss with a company name like Blast Off,’ recalls Samuelson. ‘Peter’s reply was: ‘Dear Blast Off, piss off…’.

‘There was one very old-school foreman,’ says James Pillar, Samuelson’s PR predecessor. ‘he was dealing with this lady customer who’d bought her M series car in to rectify the cabin water leak for the countless time and she asked about a bumping noise from the back.

‘“That’ll either be the fish heads butting each other or the spare wheel floating about in the well,” he replied.’

Fact is ever-more complicated electronics and body systems made it difficult to maintain quality control. Owners would find electrically opening boots mysteriously shut clam tight, parts falling off, batteries draining overnight and instruments misreading engine and road speed, sometimes all at once. I once drove a TVR through the Blackwall Tunnel at 40mph with the engine showing 10,000 rpm and the speedometer 225mph…

Another test car refused to open its boot which contained all the photographer’s cameras. In desperation I drove the car to a friend, a precision engineer who employed a fabricator for Lola Cars on the Slough Trading Estate. Jim Claridge was a resourceful and skilled craftsman and got the boot open, dismantled the electronic latch and its mounting and fabricated a stronger, better replacement in half an hour.

‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen something so badly made on sale to the general public,’ he sighed as he handed me the keys.

When the car was returned to Blackpool I got an incandescent phone call, furiously telling me off for modifying what was termed ‘the precision boot mechanism’. Hum.

While a lot of TVRs would run reliably for years, it was an ill-kept secret that some were a lot of expensive trouble for their owners. But you needed to be careful what you said in print.

TVR might have been good at spinning its own yarns such as that involving Ned, Peter’s Pointer taking a lump out of a foam scale model to create a design feature on the Chimaera (which Palmer reckons was straying fairly far from the truth), but Bristol Avenue could be very touchy when it came to what other people said about them.

John Simister, one of the best regarded journalists of his generation and a meticulous road tester, dared to point out the high level of TVR warranty claims, which had in part been the reason one dealer had backed out of a franchise in an article for The Independent newspaper.

‘It was slightly unfortunate as it followed close on the heels of a road test of a Tamora when all the instruments had failed in the early hours of the morning,’ he says. ‘TVR threatened to sue the Indy for defamation and letters flew back and forth, which I never saw.’

In the end a settlement was reached, but as Simister says: ‘it felt like a nasty compromised moment, and ironically my next TVR test was of a Sagaris, which ran like clockwork.’

Also pretty rich considering TVR had sent a ‘solicitor’s letter’ to Bob Dover at Jaguar alleging breach of design copyright on behalf of Ned…

Then there was the whole engine thing. Why on earth did Wheeler decide to build his own engine, which in automotive terms is like invading Russia in the winter?

Most independent observers wonder at the wisdom of the AJP engines and acronym which says it all: A for Al Melling the designer; J for John Ravenscroft who made it all work and P for Peter Wheeler who paid for it all.

Peter Dron isn’t alone in his view that: ‘Two problems led to TVR’s downfall in my view. First Wheeler ended up having too many models that were basically much the same, just looking different, and he took the expensive risk of commissioning his own engine, rather than having warranty costs covered by outside suppliers.’

‘Well,’ says John Ravenscroft, taking a deep breath, ‘at one time Rover was on strike and Ford was on strike and TVR very nearly went bankrupt. And, when BMW took over at Rover and Land Rover, we heard there was a fair bit of pressure not to sell V8s to TVR.’

What’s more Wheeler was heartily fed up with what he saw as continual gibes about the original source of such things as door handles, wing mirrors, lights and that Rover Buick engine. Plus at five litres in the Griffith 500, there wasn’t a great deal more to come out of that lovely but ageing unit.

TVR search parties had been out to see the Ford Mustang V8 crate engine, the GM Corvette V8 (‘Fantastic, but very expensive,’ says Anderson), and a 300bhp five-litre Holden V8 homologation-special engine sold in Australia, which Tom Walkinshaw had certain rights to. Peter would absolutely not be the first person who didn’t get on with Walkinshaw.

‘Peter wanted his own engine, but above all he wanted control,’ says Ravenscroft. ‘Even if you signed a deal, at a whim, they could change the price, change the supply conditions, stop production…

‘Besides, there’s a lot of folk who think the AJP engine cost a lot of money and that’s not true. It cost just a bit more than the Rover V8 engine.’

Anderson recalls Wheeler’s Land Rover 110 being the test bed for various engines including the Rover Buick V8 with a supercharger installation. ‘We were in Dublin and drew up at the lights with a Porsche 964 Turbo. Peter’s Land Rover just took off, shredding tread from the tyres in all directions; we never even saw the Porsche.’

In fact the Ravenscroft-styled Griffith was seen as TVR’s flagship model and it was withdrawn from sale to fit the AJP engine, but it didn’t really go under the bonnet. In the end it was dealer and public reaction which bought it back as the Griffith 500.

‘I actually had a Griffith with an AJP engine in it for testing,’ says Ravenscroft. ‘When Peter drove it home one night, he deemed it unsafe and told me I should not be driving it, which is one of the reasons the Cerbera got an integral rollcage and door bars.’

And there’s no doubt that Ravenscroft and his team’s hard work and fortitude did sort out the AJP engines eventually and eventually they were, as Jonathan Glancey put it in Wheeler’s obituary in The Guardian; ‘two masterpieces of late-flowering internal-combustion power.’ But as Giles Cooper recalls; ‘the early Speed Six was a terrible engine, rough and harsh. In fact the AJP is one reason the company isn’t here any more.’

Other opinions exist on this subject.

As far as the growing competition was concerned, Wheeler’s reaction was to diversify like crazy. In 1992 the Griffith begat the Chimaera, the Cerbera went on sale in 1995 with the first example of the AJP V8 engine, the Tuscan R (a homologation special aka T440R) and variations on a theme in 2000, the T350 was launched and the Tamora series went on sale in 2002 and the Tuscan 2, the Sagaris and the Typhon were announced in 2004…

It was exhausting and not just for the Wheeler and his engineers. When Top Gear tested the Sagaris, presenter Jeremy  Clarkson introduced the ‘Top Gear TVR Confusion Solution System’ white board, with all six quite similar models then on sale pictured.

‘I’ve no idea which one is which, they’re all exactly the same, they’re all plastic shouty things,’ boomed Clarkson.

No one else had any idea either, but Clarkson loved the Sagaris and as one insider told me: ‘over the years, he sold a lot of TVRs.’

In Blackpool, however, no one had any time to look up from the coal face.

‘The work was hard and the hours long,’ recalls Anderson.

Samuelson recalls a phone call from Wheeler one morning in a fearful mood, demanding to know where everyone was.

‘I had to remind him that it was Christmas Day and wished him a happy Christmas,’ he says.

Yet Wheeler was kind, too. Former PR Noel Palmer recalls a scary crash at the Oulton Park test day for the inaugural season of the TVR Tuscan Challenge in April 1989. Martin Crass, a BBC producer and first-time racer, had bought his yellow Tuscan outright with no sponsorship. On a damp track in this super-powerful race car, he’d lost it at Druids, destroyed the car, getting a nasty bang on the head in the process.

‘Peter went up to him,’ says Palmer, ‘put his arm around him and told him he would be at the first race… And he was.’

‘I wasn’t alone in having huge respect for Peter,’ says James Pillar. ‘He was a deeply caring man and even when times were tough, everyone got paid.’

Some of it could be a tiny bit misplaced, however. Pillar recounts one Christmas when Wheeler decided to give the staff a turkey each as a bonus. A horsebox was duly pulled into the factory filled with birds.

‘I was young man living in digs back then,’ says Pillar, ‘what on earth was I going to do with a whole turkey?’

‘When I joined I made the mistake of telling Peter I wasn’t too concerned about being well paid,’ says Anderson, ‘but I did want to drive the cars. Having that first press Griffith, J524 MHG as a company car that went on to help me win a couple of British sprint and hillclimb titles was priceless.’

Ben Samuelson says that one of Wheeler’s greatest kindnesses to him came when the company was up for sale. Against some serious interest from others including Alchemy and two separate groups of monied enthusiasts, Samuelson had put together a venture-capital-backed management buyout for TVR.

‘Peter asked me over for dinner on evening,’ recalls Samuelson. ‘He said he’d read my bid and asked me what I thought they’d do to me if the figures didn’t add up or if we didn’t quite deliver on the projections…

‘It didn’t take too long to figure out he was saying this wasn’t for me and he was right…’

With one of the bids going through an ever-more vexatious due-diligence procedure (‘I told them they were starting to irritate Peter,’ says Samuelson) the phone rang with Nikolai Smolensky at the other end saying he’d like to buy TVR.

‘Peter didn’t take it at all seriously,’ says Samuelson, ‘but then a very, very grand banker phoned to say it was a serious bid and imploring us to take it seriously, which we did.’

It was less than two weeks before the ink was drying on an agreement to sell TVR to Smolensky, no due diligence, just cash on the nail. Samuelson, who knows what the company sold for, won’t say, although rumours say it was £15 million not including the Bristol Avenue premises, which were leased to Smolensky.

And within two years Smolensky had split the company up into a number of different units, Blackpool Automotive being the former car builder known as TVR Engineering And Production Ltd and TVR Engineering Ltd, which went into administration in January 2007, though Smolensky kept control.

The assets and name were acquired in 2013 by TVR Automotive Ltd, a UK company led by Les Edgar and John Chasey, but that, as they say, is a whole other story whose conclusion is not yet clear.

As for Peter Wheeler, he enjoyed a short if busy and enjoyable retirement, working on an amphibious rapid response vehicle called the Scamander. He enjoyed racing his lightweight Aston Martin DB4, sailing his catamaran and being with his family, wife Vicky, and children Joe, Elizabeth and Annie.

After a short illness he died in 2009 aged just 65. And that was it.

‘I was very young,’ says 20-year-old Joe Wheeler, ‘so there are a lot of different stories about my Dad and these days I enjoy putting the pieces together. We used to go to the race meets and I remember going out with Dad in his Aston Martin, which bottomed out once and we had to ring Mum to come and rescue us.

‘I know he worked hard and even back then I knew he wasn’t there a lot of the time.’

Joe works at Bentley these days studying for his degree in electrical engineering and racing in various series including the McLaren Trophy and guest spots in a privately entered Bentley GT3 car at the Dubai 24 hours in which he was fourth overall. He recently disinterred the Scamander and with took it for its MoT at the garage favoured by TVR back in the day.

From the high ground of now, Wheeler’s TVR seems so long ago, faded like the Fujicolor prints, old spider-spotted magazines, and the grey hair and fond-if-shaky memories of those who were there. Like me. It’s the reason I was reluctant to take this job, since some of the players are close friends and some aren’t around anymore. I also didn’t want to rake over old ashes and add to the myths that swirl and obfuscate TVR’s past.

But in a world where Alfa Romeo can no longer place its number plates on one side of its elegant grilles, what a thing was a bellowing, snarling TVR? How on earth did Wheeler and his band of supremely talented irregulars get away with it? And with scant regard for the sort of pettifogging safety and reliability requirements which, if breached these days, would have legislators and consumer bodies parked out on the doorstep of Bristol Avenue.

‘He did have a fairly cursory view to legislation,’ says Anderson.

‘Legislation was a worry and costly,’ says Ravenscroft, ‘but it was not insurmountable. Rover told us we would never meet US emissions requirements with our version of their V8, because they had failed with the TR8. They laughed at our “chemical engineering” exhaust system with close-coupled catalyst, yet it passed first try and we were selling them weeks later in Switzerland.’

While he says that crash tests weren’t much of a problem, but anti-lock brakes and electronic stability control ‘were more problematic.’

Wheeler was at the helm for 20 years, overseeing the emergence of some of the most distinctive cars ever made, the Griffith (2300 built), Chimaera (5200), Cerbera (1490) and revamped Tuscan (1700). TVR shook the car-making world, rattled its sang froid, forced it to react and changed what was thought of as sporting motoring. These days, we’d call TVR ‘disruptive’; back then it was just a cantankerous Yorkshireman and a lot of youngsters doing what they thought best and damn the torpedoes.

‘Everyone said we couldn’t do it,’ says Ravenscroft, ‘but Peter was determined, and actually I was determined as well…’

I remember ever more powerful wedge cars wreathed in tyre smoke performance testing at Millbrook, the envious glances garnered by a Sagaris booming its way through the City Of  London at 5.00am on a June morning and Mark Hales taking that original J524MHG  Griffith through Castle Combe’s Quarry on a record breaking lap with both rear tyres absolutely alight and not a single tooth more left on the rack in opposite lock. We all think we can drive, but bejesus you had to be there…

‘God we had some fun,’ says Samuelson.

Indeed we did and there’s a six-foot, six-inch Yorkshireman to thank for all that. And as Shakespeare’s Hamlet says: ‘he was a man, take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again.’

Thank you Peter.

Heartfelt thanks to the following who have been so generous with their time and memories:

Neill Anderson, Giles Cooper, Peter Dron, Oliver Edwards, Mark Hales, Mark Hickery, Noel Palmer, James Pillar, John Ravenscroft, Ben Samuelson, John Simister, Joe Wheeler