Okay, I guess this list is not as generally well acquainted with the broom
story as I first suspected. Turn with me now to page 83 of the March 1987
"Road & Track". You know, the one with the road test of the Benetton Formula
1 car, and Peter Egan's column on Winter Racing. There near the bottom left
in the "Used Car Classic" article by Peter Bohr on the TR6 it says:
Bruce McWilliams, then executive vice-president for Leyland-Triumph of North
America and now an automotive marketing consultant, recalls that he was
horrified when Triumph tossed the new engine [2.5 liter version of GT6 mill]
into the old TR4A and pushed it out the door. Together with a factory
engineer, he brought a TR-250 prototype to his New York state country home
where they spent a day getting the car to at least *sound* different from
the old 4 cylinder TR4A. ``We stuck broom handles up the exhaust pipes and
experimented with different baffling until we got that special throaty roar
characteristic of the six cylinder TR6s,'' he says. Broom handles! Hard to
imagine in this age of computer aided design, isn't it?
mjb.
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