|From: mit-eddie!p42.f4.n105.z1.FIDONET.ORG!George.Emery (George Emery)
|Subject: Re: Spriget 1275cc vs. Triumph 1296cc
|The BMC 1275cc has a pretty decent cylinder head on it...
This is certainly true, though the same can be said for the Spitfire heads.
(I took all my references home after posting that Spitfire SSCA history.)
The factory was getting upwards of 120 hp out of the Mk II-headed 1147 cc
motor for the LeMans cars, if I remember right (check out the recent issue
of Vintage Triumph, if you happen to have a copy).
|...If you want to keep this streetable, then...
Streetable and legal and cheap. Speed costs money; how fast do you want
to spend?
|The Spridget has a better suspension and, probably, more go-faster parts
|than the Spitfire...
Ah, now here is the real reason I felt the urge to respond. If you race on
billiards tables, then perhaps the Spridget does have a better suspension.
Then again, maybe not. The original Spitfire suspension had its problems
but it still managed to take them to *average* lap times of a shade under
100 mph at LeMans in 1965, with stock (though very carefully chosen and
tuned) suspensions and highly-tweaked 1147 cc motors. And in the U.S. of
A., Kas Kastner developed a "camber compensator" to prevent rear wheel
tuck-under, which is how the Spitfire gathered all those pre-1971 wins. In
1971 with the Mk IV, Triumph introduced the central-pivot "swing-spring"
which fixed the swing-axle tuck-under problem, even for street cars, then
they lengthened the rear axles in 1973. All these improvements did work,
and made the rear quite well-behaved. The front has always been good, even
to the point of various F1 teams and several street Lotuses using some of
the pieces. (Alford & Alder, who made those uprights and whose name was
stamped on them, was a wholly-owned subsidiary of Triumph!)
So if you want IRS (assuming, of course, that the local billiards tables are
too small for racing), then the Spridget won't give it to you. While it may
be true that the Spridget can be made to go quite fast, I am not going to let
G.E. get clean away after an inflammatory shot like "The Spridget has a better
suspension..." :-)
Jim Muller
There is a car dealer out in east-central Massachusetts (somewhere between
here and Sutton ("Where is that?")) that still displays its MG *and* Triumph
signs. I didn't notice what else they carried.
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