Welcome

After running our project X-Type for the last eight months (gosh, how time flies!), It made a refreshing change to pick up the keys for our latest project, the Triumph 2500TC Estate, and get back to some genuine classic motoring. Having said that, our 51-plate Jaguar proved how premium motoring in an emerging classic needn’t cost a fortune and over those eight months our £325 bargain basement Jag has clocked up just over 9500 miles without causing us too much grief or extra expense.

I’ve only been looking after our big brown Triumph for the last couple of weeks, but so far it hasn’t blotted its copy book and drives really well after a recent rolling road tune up. What’s nice about swanning around the Triumph is the amount of attention it gets when out and about, far more than even our project XJS ever did while I was running that.

The Triumph 2500 was a very popular car back in the day and the other day an ex-traffic cop stopped me in a car park to say how much he enjoyed driving his police-spec Triumph 2500PI in the 1970s while he was on motorway patrol. Some comments I get are totally bizarre and the best quip came from a van driver who wound the window down and shouted: “That’s a nice Stag Estate matey, don’t see many of them any more!”.

This leads me reasonally smoothly into commenting about the MkI Ford Escort Twin Cam featured as a Reader Resto in this issue. With the cost of the real McCoy now costing upwards of forty grand, this one is a very accurate reproduction based from a two-door cooking version. Purists will no doubt hate the fact that a rare Ermine White 1300XL MkI Escort was sacrificed to build yet another high performance version but at least another rusty small Ford was saved from the crusher.

If you’re going to the Classic Car Restoration Show at Birmingham’s NEC over the weekend of Friday March 31 and Sunday April 2, come and say hi as I’ll be hovering around the Triumph 2000/2500 Register’s stand where members will be fitting a new set of crankshaft thrust washers to the 2500’s straight six.

Iain WakefieldManaging Editor