Marques & Models
This is the story of how a remarkable coincidence of aspiration, timing, good design and sheer luck cemented a relationship between Triumph and Sharp’s Commercials in Lancashire to create the Bond family of Equipes.
The Bond Equipes from Preston – GT2+2, GT4S and 2-Litre.
Lawrence ‘Lawrie’ Bond was an engineer by trade. He set up his own engineering workshop in Blackpool during WW2, and by the end of the decade had designed and built two 500cc racers, the ‘Doodlebug’ Bond Special and the Type C Bond. He also designed the first Bond Minicar three-wheeler powered by a 3.25bhp 125cc Villiers motorbike engine, and arranged to have it built by Sharp’s Commercials in nearby Preston.
Before long, Sharp’s had bought the rights to the Bond Minicar while Bond himself concentrated on a number of two-wheeled vehicles. In 1956 he set up Lawrence Bond Cars Limited, and one of his first tasks was to design a small sports car for Berkley Cars Ltd, a company set up by Berkeley
Coachwork Ltd to supplement their flagging caravan manufacturing business. Other projects followed, including micro and racing cars, but it was in the early 1960s that Sharp’s Commercials, who had continued to build and develop the Minicar concept, found that social and economic changes were making this austerity range increasingly obsolete.
By now the Minicar was up to its MkG designation, a version launched in 1961 and powered by a 246cc Villiers engine. Though three-wheelers enjoyed preferential rates of purchase tax and road fund licence compared to four-wheelers, they were already facing stiff competition from new small cars such as the BMC Mini when the financial advantage was eroded by reductions in purchase tax rates from November 1962. The Minicar would struggle on until 1966, when it was replaced by the all-new and far more powerful (it had a Hillman Imp engine in the back!) but still three-wheeled Bond 875. For various reasons outside the scope of this feature the Bond 875 never reached its full potential, but it can’t have helped that development and
production was delayed while Sharp’s concentrated on another project – as early as the start of 1962 they had decided to expand their range and build a full-size sporting four seater/ four-wheeler. Lawrie Bond was commissioned to style it, and the Bond Equipe was the result.
The cost of developing a new car from scratch is, and always has been, ruinously expensive. That is often true even for the biggest of car makers (think Imp again!) and that’s one reason why most ‘all new’ models carry over rather more of the old model than manufacturers like to admit. More often than not it is the mechanical package that gets carried over with perhaps just the odd tweak or two, while the body undergoes a more dramatic makeover to reflect the changing fads and fashions of the day.
So how did a small manufacturer such as Sharp’s Commercials create the Equipe in a market that is skewed towards high volumes and massive investment? Like most similar operators, they found the best way forward was to let somebody else do the developing for them! The only way they could afford to turn this dream into a reality was to make the body out of glassfibre and to buy in the running gear, and with its separate chassis rather than monocoque construction, Triumph’s Herald was the only viable donor in town. In fact, Sharp’s Commercials secured an unusual and extremely favourable deal with Standard-Triumph. Basically they bought in Triumph’s Herald chassis and Spitfire running gear, clothed it with their own fibreglass body and interior trim, then sold the resulting coupés through Standard-Triumph’s worldwide network of dealers.
They got away with this close and in some respects rather one-sided agreement with Standard-Triumph because the proposed coupé did not compete directly with any of the Triumph cars (the Herald Coupé was a slow-seller and destined to be dropped from 1964), and in many ways it suited Triumph to have something extra on display to help pull potential punters into the showroom. Sharp’s cause might well have been helped too by the fact that their parent company were Loxhams Garages, who were major Triumph distributors in the northwest.
Mechanically, Sharp’s were able to take something of a pick-and-mix approach to the Triumph parts bins. So, for example, they got the Herald’s wide chassis to carry a 2+2 body, but the Spitfire’s engine and brakes to give it a more sporty edge. The Spitfire engine was of course itself merely a version of the
Herald’s 1147cc motor, but with power boosted from 39bhp (51bhp for the Herald 12/ 50) to no fewer than 63 horses, it gave the Equipe a respectable turn of speed to match its fastback styling.
That styling aped the Triumphs of the day by having a one-piece front end which hinged forwards for unrivalled access to the engine bay. Behind this sat a Herald bulkhead, windscreen, floorpan and doors which blended seamlessly into a sharply-raked fastback tail culminating in a pair of slightly rounded but still distinctly Herald- esque rear fins. The chassis was slightly shortened at the rear but the suspension was pure Herald, although the rear spring had to be reset to suit the Equipe’s lighter back end.
The new car was officially launched at the Earls Court Motor Show in October 1963, just a year after Triumph’s own Spitfire had first seen the light of day. The marketing genius and sheer good luck that had enabled Bond Cars Ltd (as it was soon renamed) to persuade Triumph to sell and service the Equipe through their own dealer network afforded the tiny Preston company a vast and world-wide reach that was out of all proportion to the small numbers of cars produced – just 451 of the original GT were built between October 1963 and 1964, followed by an additional 2505 examples of its successor, the GT4S (4S for Four Seater – the original was retrospectively
called the GT 2+2).
That GT4S was an attempt to answer some of the criticisms of the initial offering. One of these was the almost total lack of rear headroom for anyone other than children, so the roof was raised by a couple of inches at the back. This gave the rear screen a slightly steeper slope, before a sharp turn sent the body on back to a new Kamm tail, complete with opening bootlid – GT owners had to access their luggage from inside the car because there was no external opening. Also included in the re- design was a far more stylised nose with twin headlamps built into oval recesses for a love-it- or-hate-it face, one that had room for potential use of the Vitesse sixcylinder engine designed in.
In February 1967 the GT4S became the GT4S 1300, mirroring the Spitfire’s engine growth to 1296cc and 75bhp. And Bond was not finished yet because in 1967 the GT4S was indeed joined by an Equipe 2-litre GT variant, although rather than being a more powerful version of the existing model, this housed Triumph Vitesse running gear in an allnew coupé body. In comparison to the GT’s curves, the new body was rather plain and uninspiring, but it did echo the styling trends of the day. The GT4S continued in production alongside the Vitesse-based newcomer until 1970, and as the 1300GT just made it through the takeover of Bond by three-wheeler and fibreglass rival Reliant announced in February 1969.
Whereas Bond had to watch carefully every ounce they added to their three-wheelers to keep them under the 8cwt limit to qualify for tax and licencing concessions, there were no such constraints for the bigger cars and the Equipe GT was not a lightweight – at 1716lb it was far closer to the Herald’s 1771lb than the Spitfire’s 1589lb. In some ways this is an inevitable result of the bigger chassis and body, but it is also true that quality fibreglass is far from the lightweight material we often presume, especially if it is made thick and strong.
That description does seem to sum up the Bond well. The occasional star crack aside, there is generally little indication of the material used for the body when you climb into an Equipe 2+2 or GT4S, thanks in no small measure to the steel Herald doors. These are heavy enough to rattle the B-posts if you slam them, but in fairness the same thing is true of the Herald itself.
The seats themselves are thin but nicely shaped buckets, and the body seems wider on the inside than its narrow exterior would suggest. It does force a rather unusual (but typically Triumph) driving position on you though, with feet over to the right and wheel towards the left – it sounds more uncomfortable than it is in reality.
Ahead of you is a wooden dash that looks pure Herald, until you notice the rev counter alongside the speedo, plus ancillary gauges the Herald did without. The switch gear layout is from the Herald 1200. The performance is far more peppy than the Herald though, contemporary testing crediting the Bond GT with 0-50mph and 0- 60mph times of 12.3 and 17.6 seconds respectively, while even the beefed up Herald 12/ 50 took 15.2 and 25.2 seconds for the same two sprints.
Outright performance aside though, there is much less in it. The Bond enjoys the same great turning circle as the Herald, the same precise yet light steering and the same great gear change (including incidentally the same propensity to graze your knuckles on the radio when selecting first!). It also has the same tendency to jack up the rear wheel if you lift off the throttle during hard cornering that so troubled road testers pushing a car to its limit on track, but which in reality is rarely a problem on the road. But if the Bond GT feels like a Herald to drive, there is no disgrace in that as the Herald was one of the nicest cars of the era to drive. If you are going to take your inspiration from elsewhere, you may as well take it from one of the best.
As for the 2- Litre, this time Bond ditched the Herald’s upright screen in favour of a
more angled window and the door skins were bespoke, so the car was more expensive to build but the design had perhaps a more unified look than the GT4S which continued to be sold alongside it. With a 1998cc six pot engine producing 95bhp and Vitesse running gear, the 2-litre was obviously a faster car. In fact it could crack 100mph, and dispatched the 0- 60mph sprint in just 11.5 seconds.
The 2- Litre Equipe proved a popular combination of style and performance, quickly pushing the older design somewhat into the shade. However, that extra performance soon focused people’s attention on Triumph’s less-than-perfect design of rear suspension. Fortunately, Bond were able to incorporate the improved Vitesse MkII rear suspension design into their own MkII launched in October 1968. At the same time they introduced a convertible version, which proved popular enough to secure half of all Equipe MkII sales. Ultimate numbers were low however, not least because at £1305 the drop-top Bond cost £284 more than the equivalent Vitesse convertible.
There were thoughts of turning the GT4S into a convertible in an attempt to reverse its declining sales, but they were overtaken by developments when Reliant took over Bond Cars Limited in early 1969 and promptly put a stop to all Equipe development. The story of why Reliant took over their main opposition in the three-wheeled marketplace is complicated and multifaceted, but there is no doubt that Bond’s close relationship with Standard-Triumph was one of the major attractions.
In fact, Reliant set about designing their own successor to the Equipe, using Triumph running gear and positioned between the three-wheeled Reliant Regal and the larger Scimitar, in the hope of continuing and expanding the arrangement, but this never progressed beyond the prototype stage. In part that was because of the merger between Leyland and BMC in 1968, bringing other marques and models into the dealership network that squeezed out the Bonds. The last examples were assembled in August 1970 and sold through auction because of the dubious build quality, a sad end for a great project.