The Death of British Autos:
I don't know that I could agree that re-engineering was the
death of Triumph. I think that marketing and bad management
practice would be a better description. I recently purchased
(and read) Graham Robson's "The Racing Triumphs" which is a
history of Triumph racing. In the book there are many things
which might predict the death of the Triumph marque, given its
behavior in motorsports. They are a kind of litany of bad
corporate practice.
Lack of flexibility. When Triumph's racing program was re-
started after a brief death in the early sixties, the group
was assembled as part of the Engineering department, with
staff drawn from the various parts of the engineering and
production branches. Work rules assigned specific tasks to
laborers from specific branches. "If I told the wrong fellow
to pick up a spanner, I could have caused a work stoppage at
the entire plant." Not being completely lost,(that happened
in the 70's) a solution was obtained by reorganizing the racing
program into a "performance tuning" group which was part of
the Service department. Repair mechanics were allowed to work
on any part of the car.
Lack of feedback. The Triumph factory always (and only)
supported rally cars, not road-racers, yet it was noted that
the TR7s were always dominant in those rallies with a road
course bias. Most earlier Triumphs had this bias as well.
Yet the factory never made any attempts to move to road racing,
even when private teams, like Kas Kastner (who received luke-
warm support at some times) proved that the Triumphs were
competitive road-racers.
Bad personnel management. Triumph repeatedly managed to
alienate their better drivers in Europe. Even worse, I think
was the regard for the Americans like Kas Kastner, who were
actually able to win with Triumphs (unlike the factory).
Kastner was able to obtain perhaps 15-20% more power out of
Triumph engines than the factory race preparers. The factory
engineers didn't believe it, preferring to think that he was
exaggerating. They didn't bother to actually test his engines
themselves until shortly before the TR6 and the GT6 were retired
from factory racing. Kastner, if I read Robson properly,
does not particularly think kindly of the Triumph support
for racing, or their appreciation of what he did for their
American sales and image.
Inter-organizational distrust. The Triumph performance tuning
program was run from the Abingdon factory, and the folks in
Coventry never trusted them. Thus they never had much in the
way of cooperation of projects, or even help with ideas. Of
course the folks in Abingdon viewed them as outsiders as well.
Laziness. Triumph never made an effort to homologate
performance parts or special racing kits, even though doing
so was a matter of paper work more than anything else. Triumph
also didn't bother to build things on time. The TR8 is
probably the best example of this. The car (actually a
TR7 V8) was announced as the factory race car about 10 months
before it appeared in a race. The components of the car were
all available, it just didn't get built and tested.
In a sense, Triumph deserved to die as it did. It's a shame
because no one else was building cars for the roadster market, so
those of us who want roadsters were stuck for most of the 80's.
Only the continued survival of the Alfa Spider, proved that the
market niche really existed (until the Miata appeared..)
Greg F.
(Who gets pretty steamed over the fact that when he was finally
old enough to drive, muscle cars were long dead, American luxury
yachts had shrunk, and roadsters had just disappeared)
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