Description
Author: David Knowles, Hardbound, 240 Pages, ISBN: 9781785001376, 1st Edition, 2016
This book tells the life story of the much-loved Triumph TR6 in unprecedented detail, bringing to life the genesis and magnificent history of a favourite classic British sports cars of its era. 1969 was a year of transition, sitting at the tail end of those so-called swinging sixties, notorious for decadence and full of change.
By the summer of 1969, man had reached the moon and the future seemed laden with promise. Within four years, the folly of such simplistic optimism had been laid bare, with Middle Eastern conflict, rampant oil-fired inflation, and the growth of powerful automotive safety, energy-conservation and pollution-control lobbies. In this context, you might be forgiven for thinking that the arrival of a new Triumph sports car at the Brussels Motor Show in January 1969 was a classic case of monumental bad timing.
However, the Triumph TR6 had much in its favour: it was good looking, bred from a noble sports car lineage, made all the right noises and labelled its driver as a non-conformist, fun-loving individual in a way that few contemporaries could emulate. The TR6 was distinctly against the grain, not only representing the end of an era but offering a magnificent counterpoint to the beige and brown conformity of the troubled new decade.
At a time when other car makers were dancing to the tune of fuel economy, performance caps and clumsily engineered safety features, the last bastion of the traditional TR sports car family was an automotive antidote, even if in 1969 the age of the basic underlying concept of the car was already apparent.
Even so, sales indicated that there were clearly enough people who shared a passion for the neat six-cylinder Triumph, and when North American Federal legislation proposed at the start of the seventies seemed destined to outlaw open-topped sports cars, the appeal of the classic British sports car class received an under-dog boost, which was even further strengthened when the threatened legislation itself failed to pass into law.
By then, many other car makers had left the open-topped sports car field largely to the British Leyland family, and the popularity of the TR6 actually grew, especially in the USA with large numbers of vehicles being exported. Despite everything that the legislators could throw in its general direction, the TR6 carried on, sales persisting in its primary market even beyond the launch of the car intended to succeed it in the market place, the very different TR7.
By the time it tiptoed out of production, in Britain's long, hot summer of 1976, the TR6 had broken prevailing
TR sales records and found neatly 92,000 customers. Many mourned its passing and even though the new TR7 would go on to sell in even larger numbers, it would take many years before this wedge-shaped new-generation sports car would eam anything like the levels of affection bestowed upon its predecessor.
Triumph TR6 is dedicated to the last traditional open-topped TR sports car with a separate chassis, the classic in-line six-cylinder Triumph TR6 of 1969 to 1976. This low-slung, lithe roadster later handed the TR baton to a very different next generation model which would also prove to be the last Triumph sports car.
