After learning a great deal about Triumph motor cars from the Herald From Hell, you'd think that I'd be smart enough never to go near anything with that badge again. Yes, well... Let's say that I fell victim to the "they can't all be that bad" idea. (Hint: Yes they can). Coupled with the English Sports Car Mystique, that's a powerful force.
I was working in Holland, along with several other young Englishmen, and being contract workers we were overpaid and under-responsibilitied. It was Paul who started it, with his Blue MGB GT. Rather a nice car, actually, with comfort, a modicum of practicality and a sunshine roof. Never mind that it was actually rather ordinary in its mechanicals, this thing looked and sounded like a sports car -- and it was nice to travel in.
Hmmmm....
And then Jeff took his Rover 3500 back to England and sold it for scrap. Now that was rather a pity, really, because I liked that car. It is, however, true that it was a bit of a deathtrap as it turned out, having been cobbled together from at least two written-off Rovers welded together in the middle. The real problem, though, was when he arrived back in Hattem with a bright red TR6 in beautiful condition. This thing was really nice! OK, so it had a trunk that was laughably small, it was cramped, had ride comfort comparable to agricultural machinery and the top leaked like a sieve when it rained (nothing in particular wrong with the top, that was how they left the factory). On the positive side, though, there were some unarguably desirable things: It was red (not "red", but "RED, DAMMIT! RED!"). The engine sounded wonderful, like a symphony in six cylinders. It was a convertible. It had two seats (the MGB GT had a small parcel shelf behind the front seats that British Leyland optimistically referred to as "two occasional seats" -- for what? Hamsters?). Oh, and with a 2.5L six cylinder fuel-injected engine it could actually keep up with a VW Golf, if pushed, although that was never really the point of this kind of car.
"Let's see..." I thought. "It would be nice to have something that was fun to drive" (Warning! Find a hobby!) "I could keep The Can for when I needed somewhere to sleep, and imagine having a heater!" (This is getting dangerous)
I made a trip back to England for a couple of weeks and picked up a copy of Motorsport. ( Don't look! Put it away!) "Well, look here. Lots of classified ads for sports cars..." (Bad idea!) "That looks nice, perhaps I'll drop in when I pass that way" ( Extremely bad idea!)
What could I have been thinking? In a world full of MGBs, TR6s, even E-Type Jaguars, I bought (gulp!) a TR7. Probably the least desirable vehicle of the whole Triumph TR series. Not only that, but a hardtop. In mitigation, I plead the following:
Actually, it did look pretty neat. We've grown accustomed to such things now, but this was 1978, and it really did turn heads then.
And so I came to own another Triumph. (Sigh!) I suppose it wasn't all that bad a car, and by the standards of what I'd driven before it was nice: Quiet, relatively comfortable, I even thought it was a sports car. I replaced the prop shaft and most of the Clunk!-Thumping! went away. I got into the habit of filling up the coolant reservoir each day (never did find out where it was going, but it drank heavily) and it stopped boiling. Winter came, and I found that two beer bottles full of hot water were enough to get the engine started (one poured over each of the enormous SU carburetors to unfreeze it before cranking).
Luckily, I had taken some flying lessons in England, and was able to diagnose another problem before it killed me. Because of the size of the carburetors, and the limited space under the sloped hood, the intake manifold was a curved contraption nearly a foot long. The problem with that was that it amplified vibration to the extent that the carburetors objected. The quick fix was a rubber joint between them and the intake manifold to insulate against vibration and, incidentally, heat. That was just hunky-dory until they got both cold and wet, and if there is an apt description for Holland in winter, it's "cold and wet". It's in the nature of a carburetor to cool itself, so when there is sufficient water in the air, ice tends to form in the throttle body. Pilots are familiar with this, and carbureted aircraft engines have a provision for using heated air when necessary. The Triumph Motor Company appeared not to be aware of this, and a fairly common occurrence was for ice to form at full throttle and hold it open when the gas pedal was released. This could be exciting if you weren't ready for it.
I got used to the continuing ice storms that kept the roads slick. Driving to work one morning I was passed by a pair of ice skaters on the road, and that can really make you nervous. Just for a change, along came a heavy snowfall that closed the roads for a day. One of my headlamps had failed a week or two previously, and investigation showed that it wasn't the bulb (drat!). As I returned to work after the snowfall I was stopped by the Rijkspolitie who told me, very politely, that they had been noticing my failed headlamp for the past couple of weeks and if I knew what was good for me they wouldn't notice it again. Time to fix it. That night's snowfall found me lying in the parking lot, as far under the TR as I could get, cursing the Leyland ST chin spoiler that effectively reduced access to the headlamp area to zero. It took a while, but I finally tracked it down. Triumph had cheaped-out again: The lifting headlamp pods in the TR7 required a flexible power connection to the lamps, and they had opted for a simple loop of wire that would have been fine if they hadn't passed it under a piece that it should have gone over (Clamps? This was a company that didn't even use fuses on the Herald). Hundreds of cycles had finally tugged the copper inside the insulation apart, leaving a cable that looked fine but didn't work (kind of a metaphor for the car, I was beginning to think). The diagnosis and fitting of a patch cable would have been a breeze if I had three hands, each equipped with two-foot-long, knife thin, fingers -- but I don't. It was not a pleasant evening.
I began to pay close attention to the relationship of temperature, dew point and relative humidity, and was still thinking about how to fit a carb heat system when spring came.
And then, along came a Good Thing disguised as a Bad Thing.
I'd made another trip to England for a couple of weeks, passed a pleasant time and was ready to get back to work. By that time I was working in den Haag, and it was convenient to take a cabin on the night ferry from Harwich, sleep on the boat and drive straight to work from Hoek van Holland. Easy. What could possibly go wrong? Priorite a Droite, that's what! If you know what it is, you're probably thinking "yep, I know what happened", otherwise let me explain: As a nation, the French have a remarkable sense of humor (&"Your Jerry Lewis, he is so funny!") and they enjoy practical jokes -- How else to explain the fuel filler placement of the Renault 8 or the Priorite a Droite rule that gives complete priority at unmarked road junctions to traffic coming from the right? Even if it's a farm tractor pulling out of a rutted lane onto a busy highway in front of a speeding overloaded camion. Unfortunately, some other countries, not realizing that it was a joke, thought "that's a good idea, we can save a lot of money on paint and Stop signs". Holland was one of them. Luckily, wiser heads prevailed for the most part, and almost all junctions are marked.
Almost.
Between Hoek van Holland and downtown den Haag is a junction where a small side street enters a busy divided highway, and it's unmarked. One moment I was driving to work without a care in the world, and the next I was looking at the side of a Mazda 323 in my windshield that was getting rapidly closer.
The marks on the road showed that I had time for about thirty feet of hard braking before the impact just behind its driver's door. It was enough: Neither of us was so much as scratched or bruised. The Mazda was banana-shaped but the Triumph was now the short-wheelbase variant.
I felt really bad about the crash; it was all my fault, of course. The Rijkspolitie came, and started clearing things up. The driver of the Mazda took me aside and quietly told me not to worry: He was fine, he had another car at home and he was tired of the Mazda anyway. To my great surprise, I didn't even get a ticket for missing the junction. Everybody was so nice to me that I felt even guiltier. I found later from one of my colleagues who lived in an apartment overlooking the junction that crashes there were very common.
It turned out that, although the TR7 didn't look too badly damaged, it was a goner. So I took the insurance money, went home to The Can (which was parked, waiting faithfully outside my home) and most assuredly did not buy another Triumph.