Ginger, a 1977 Triumph Spitfire, has made many trips throughout the central United States. Because she is not currently happy to maintain speeds of more than 55 miles per hour for very long, we always travel on the back roads and byways. In the more than thirteen thousand miles we’ve driven Ginger since we took…
May 2012 Some friends dragged me to British Car Week’s National Meet. Thank God for friends. The highlight of the trip was meeting a car named Grace and her driver, John Nikas. Grace, a 1953 Austin Healey 100-4, was traveling the United States in an effort to offer love, encouragement and hope for people affected…
Memories seem to come and go like a change of seasons but there is one that lingers and remains with me, forever alive… It was back in the summer of ’73, early evening when I heard a peculiar loud rumbling sound coming down the street. I was upstairs lying on my bed reading a book…
My 1978 Spitfire 1500 trip odometer reset knob is oddly located below, and to the right of the steering column. Being below the dash board, it is nearly invisible to the driver. In fact it was several months after I brought the car home that I actually discovered that it had a trip odometer (trip-o-meter)…
Well sports car fans I am learning many lessons while putting together my Triumph Spitfire 4. Lesson number one is there are slightly more complications when you use equipment other than original parts for a specific year car. Interesting and challenging but with pitfalls. Lesson number two: get people that know what they are doing…
Despite having a curvy Italian body, strong sales numbers and a class win at LeMans, the popular, gutsy Triumph Spitfire gets little respect in the sports car world. The first cars had a few quirks—most fans will admit that—but most were cured by 1971, making the Spitfire a fun run-around-town car. Modifications can transform the…
We constantly hear from people who want to buy a classic car. They yearn for that sports car experience—a curvy road, a humming engine and a nice day to put the top down. Some want to do a frame-up restoration including windshield repair and transmission overhaul, while others just want a play car to take…
By Les Bidrawn; photography by Jim Funkhouser Put a college-aged male in a Spitfire 1500, make him wear a sweater, dark sunglasses and place a white Labrador (put a red bandanna round the dog’s neck for added effect) in the passenger seat. Now send him driving through a local campus. I did the very thing…
Did this car run Le Mans? Amidst the stables and green rolling hills of Rancho Santa Fe, California, in a garage filled with legendary race cars, brutes from NASCAR’s steep banks, lies a small terror of the race track. A legend at Willow Springs, it’s something of a historical question mark. The 1965 Triumph Spitfire…
The Triumph Spitfire By Wiley Davis The Triumph Spitfire shares a name with the legendary defender of Great Britain, the Supermarine Spitfire fighter aircraft. The connection, however, is in name only, and there is no real evidence that suggests this was intentional. There are legends that claim otherwise. One such story hints that Triumph was…
