30 Years At Triumph: Tony Lee Talks About His Time at Triumph-Standard

(What started out as a Question and Answer interview, developed into several hours of intimate glimpses into theTriumph legend, from a man who spent thirty years in the Triumph engineering department. Here are just a few of the stories that Tony shared with us on his visit to Moss Motors in October 1991. —Ed.)

His Early Years

Since his childhood, family and friends surrounding Tony Lee had a premonition that he might someday end up in a car oriented career. At least of course that’s what they say now (and probably did then also, when looking through family photos). Thinking back to those “what do I want to be when I grow up days”, Tony’s interests lay in maths and engineering. His father did have a slight Influence on his career as he knew the chief maintenance engineer at Standard quite well,and in January 1946. Tony became apprenticed to the now renamed Standard-Triumph

Early Triumph Testing

1949 saw Tony back in the engineering department and continuing his apprenticeship. He was basically involved in all around engineering work, testing components such as shocks, fan belts, water pumps and oil filters. Tony recalled the two favorite words used when speaking to apprentices, nip and whip, as in”nip over there and whip that thing out” or being asked to create a shock absorber testing rig using “that sheet of metal over there Tony started performance testing on the first post-war Triumph, the intriguingly styled l800. He progressed into road testing and worked with John Lloyd, who was experimental shop manager until 1959 when Tony took over the post. They spent much of their time working at M.I.R.A., devising performance tests.

The British Motor Industry needed a vehicle testing area and chose to buy an old wartime airfield near Nuneaton, just down the road fromCoventry.They equipped it with a banked track and various road surfaces, and called it the Motor Industry Research Association facility. For example, one ofTriumph’s worse areas of body and chassis failure was on the notorious Belgium (cobbled stone) pave. To test for major failures, they faithfully reproduced this pave at M.I.RA..using thousands of 4 inch granite blocks that were very durable-and also considerably varied in height. Ken Richardson drove and drove the test TRs on this surface for hours, often at speeds over 100 mph. If a car could run through a thousand miles of this test at 30mph, without major structural failure, it passed this test! Another time they had to run the stricter California maintenance standards on two TR8s. After120,000 mites, Tony would strip the cars down, then check part conditions and compare them with 1000 miles on the pave. No comparison, he said!

Another testing concern was dust entry into cars, so they filled an old wartime half-round aircraft hangar (called a Nissen hut, and very familiar to ex-USAF personnel) with China clay (of talcum powder consistency). Triumphs were then driven through the hut at various speeds, with car doors and windows tightly closed, to ascertain if the seals were efficient.

Some of the Key Players

In the early 1950s, Sir John Black, the Managing Director of Standard Triumph, failed to take over Morgan and was fed up with the success of the Abingdon MG TD and the Coventry Jaguar. He then decided that ft was time for Triumph to enjoy its share of the glory. It was easy for him to push employees towards taking a share in the sports car market since he had a tremendous influence on what happened within the company due to its small size. He spent a great deal of time strolling on the shop floor chatting with the workers, and even more time in engineering, where Walter Belgrove was the chief stylist, and Harry Webster was Director of Engineering.

One evening, Tony and Harry were working a late shift, and at 1 am, Harry told Tony to grab a car and go down to get dinner from the canteen. He went over to the experimental division, saw a car, jumped into it, started it up, where it fired and promptly stopped. He lifted the bonnet, saw the engine on fire and no carburetor, inlet or exhaust manifold, just a petrol pipe sticking out ready to be bolted into the carburetor. He put the fire out and continued to the canteen. (Apparently enough gas had squirted into an intake port to enable the engine to fire!) The end of another typical day with Harry Webster!

TR2 & TR3 Stories

Tony feels that the concept for the TR2 began in 1950-51 when Ken Rawlings drove into the Experimental shop and built “Buttercup”, his special-built, bright yellow Standard-chassied car with a Massey Ferguson tractor engine. A light bulb clicked on and there was born the idea for separate chassis and body design areas. Instead of putting everything together at once, the engineers would sort out the “birdcages” (chassis and running gear) before the body was ready to go on. The old way of designing starting with the frame, required the tinsmiths and steel workers to build the chassis frame, then the engineers to come in and run torsion tests, then back to the chassis, etc.

While Triumph was development oriented, BMC was mileage oriented. TR never kept development cars, they simply chopped them up and used them for the next project, unlike MG, who kept their “hallowed vehicles”. Triumph worked to a very constrained budget, which is well documented in the origin of the TR2. With hundreds of Flying Nine chassis frames in existence, there was a great interest to use as many existing Triumph parts as possible and to keep costing to a new low. Although these were the times that brought Triumph into the competitive sports car market, Triumph enthusiasts today still mourn the loss of many one-off prototypes now destroyed.

Tony worked with what is now called the TR3 Beta, of which only two prototypes were built. This car was built between the TR3A and TR4, on a TR4 chassis with TR3 components, as a safety measure in case they couldn’t get the TR4 body together. One of the test runs found Tony a passenger to Ken Richardson, who from 1952-’61, was unofficial competitions’ manager at Triumph. Ken had been a test driver with the B.R.M. Racing team and was a very talented racing driver. He was part of the team responsible for reworking the TR2 from the Triumph Sports prototype in just five months! He later went on to gain fame as a renowned rally driver, leading Triumph TR3s to victory in such classic events as the Rallye des Alpes and the Tulip Rallye. It was this competition success that led to the TR3 being the first mass produced car to use disc brakes. Obviously an excellent driver, Ken liked to ride on someone’s tail, pushing them hard. This time he was following an Alpine Sunbeam on winding roads and pushed him till the Alpine slid really wide on a corner. When the driver finally regained control, Ken was still one foot off his bumper, and smirking wildly…Another legend about Ken concerns his great disregard for “stop” signs. He felt that since most of the time there would be nobody else at the T intersection, it was a waste of time to stop (his passengers did not echo this belief).

On Michelotti & the TR7

Legendary designer Giovanni Michelotti could produce an idea or shape in his mind in no time at all, and excelled at clay styling. He submitted one of the 3 styling versions of the car that was to follow the TR6, and Tony was sent down to Turin to take a look at this yellow car they called “Bullet”. This Michelotti design was not chosen, and the TR7 became the now famous wedge-shape, designed by HarrisMann at Longbridge.

The TR7 convertible had an interesting birth. After the creation of TR7 in coupe form as originally planned, they removed the top to see what the car would look like (since, for some reason, roof intrusion regulations didn’t apply to a soft top). Tony’s second visit to Turin was to collect the 2nd TR7 Miko design, a British racing green convertible made from a hard top model with the top chopped off and refined. They used to move a lot of their pre-production cars around quite Illegally,since all touring documents specified no changes would be done to the car while in Italy. This time Tony drove the car through Italy in a winter storm with all the windows down in an effort to get the smell of new paint out of the car before passing through customs.

Another note on TR7prototype road testing, was the Bedgelert hill climb in the Welsh mountains. On a 20% grade, the cars were thrashed up and down on loose gravel. Tony said if you could climb the hill in first gear, then the car had enough power, and if you could get down without crashing, past the tight hairpin,your brakes were deemed sufficient! Note the wooden slats added to foil the competitor’s spying cameras!

Today in the United States

What surprised Tony so much on his trip to the VS. was the enthusiasm he saw here over the Triumph marque. He had had no concept of people’s enthusiasm and dedication so long after the cars were new! After spending his life at Triumph, working so many years with these cars, he found it thrilling and heartening to see people loving and cherishing the cars he has put so much of his life into.

The Future

What is the future of the Triumph sports car? He sees the need for the archetypal British sports car with modern aerodynamics and fuel economy. After all, look at the advertising campaign for the popular Mazda Miata. The ads stress the car as being similar to the Triumph and MG but without the nearly legendary difficulties. When BL can join together the best of the past with the necessities of today, that’s when we’ll see another sports car in the Triumph genre.