About a million years ago, we purchased a small competitor named Start Your Engines, located in Beltsville, MD. The deal included the usual stuff, like parts, mailing lists, and some employees. Okay, so we didn’t actually buy the employees, but one of them, in the form of our ace catalog man, Eric Wilhelm, has stayed…
To read the first part of this series, click the following link: Part 1 In which Sam Bennett continues his story of life in the MG factory during the emergence of the MG sports car. By Marcham Rhoade I carried on working in the rectification department for some time on the J2s being produced at…
To read earlier parts in this series, click the following links: Part 1 Part 2 In which Sam Bennett continues to describe life and times at the MG factory in the early days. By Marcham Rhoade Pressed steel used to make the chassis for the MGs, and the bodies came from Carbodies of Coventry. As…
I have insider information about the first days of some of these cars and it isn’t all pretty. Don’t get me wrong, I love British cars. I go to all the car shows I can within a 100-mile radius of Columbus, Ohio. To pay for college in the early 1970s, I worked as a lot…
The Triumph monument and its history By Bill Piggott April 16, 2000 will go down in the history of the Standard Triumph Motor Co. as a very special day, the day that may prove to be the final act in the history of the old company on its principal site in Coventry. On that Sunday,…
In these days of mass produced automobiles, using more and more robots, and fewer and fewer human beings, have you ever thought what it was like in the early days of sports car production? What sort of people put your dinosaur of a British car together? Well, come with us back to the 1930s (when…
By Paul Richardson My father, Ken Richardson, who was competition manager of Standard Triumph, organized an attempt on World Endurance Records with a TR3 at the Monza circuit in Italy—and I was to witness it. Ken decided to combine the record attempt with our family holiday on the Italian coast near Pisa. When the news…
By Paul Richardson The international rallies in Europe in the ’50s were run over some of the most testing routes imaginable, especially the Criterium Des Alpes, commonly known as The Alpine. As its name implies, the rally was essentially contested over the high Alpine passes of central Europe and was generally regarded as the toughest…
By Paul Richardson After my father Ken’s Competition Department at Standard Triumph was closed in the early ’60s (due to the Leyland takeover), he was invited to join the TVR sports car company in Blackpool as Competition Manager. The family moved north from Coventry, and I also joined TVR. I worked in the Experimental Department,…
Jaguar’s XK series wakes the post-war world America’s love affair with the automobile is so well documented, it has become more than just a cliché—it has moved comfortably into the banal land of things that are taken for granted. Consumers are spoiled brats of industry to an extent, wanting to see a new car model…
