GRAHAM ROBSON
DAIMLER SP250 VS TR3A
I was delighted to see the article on the Bond MkC Minitruck, which took me back to around 1976 or ’77 when I worked with a guy called Mick Stacey, a member of the Bond Owners Club who had a small collection of Bonds. He used to come to work in what I think was a MkF. I have seen that car at shows around the area, so he's still running it, though I haven't actually seen him for many years.
Anyway, one day I was in a local scrapyard looking for a gearbox for my Mk1 Cortina when I saw a strange looking little car. Investigation showed that it was a Bond, but not one I recognised. I asked the yard guys not to crush it just yet and told Mick about it as soon as I could. We met up and went to the scrapyard, where Mick was amazed to identify the car I'd found as a MkB Minitruck, which was about as rare as rocking horse droppings at the time. Mick made sure it went to somebody in the club, so hopefully it is still be out there being enjoyed by an enthusiast.
As for Iain Ayre's piece on qualifications, I've recently retired from the scientific analysis industry after nearly 50 years. The place was full of Phds when I started, but they were old school types who achieved degrees because they were clever, not just because it was the fashionable thing to do. These guys seemed able to use their knowledge on any type of analytical method and they weren't at all precious about their intelligence. One guy I first worked for back in 1971 was a doctor, but he never made anything of it. I worked with him many times over the years and kept in contact when he retired, but it was only on the sad occasion of his funeral that I discovered he had a double first from Oxford. As for me, I came into work with very few qualifications and managed to work my way to reasonably senior engineering positions, still working at the coal face rather than management and I managed to make a good contribution all through my working life (I hope).
Working in Coventry’s motor industry in the late 1950s was always great fun, especially if one was lucky enough to be ‘on the inside’ and knew what was going on behind the scenes. Take my own experiences, for instance, for as a keen young blood working at Jaguar and frequenting all the same pubs as other like-minded enthusiasts working in the local motor industry, it was always good to know what was happening, and what might be happening sometime soon.
Even so, some events still managed to surprise us all. In March 1959 for example, I recall being surprised by the unheralded arrival of the new Daimler SP250 sports car (Daimler wanted to call it ‘Dart’, but Chrysler of the USA objected as they held the rights to that name for use on Dodge cars). Surprised not just that it came from a Coventry-based company which had never before built sports cars, but because in many ways its chassis, transmission and running gear bore an uncannily close resemblance to those in the Triumph TR3A.
It was Edward Turner who'd had much to do with this. Noted from the late 1930s as a designer of engines for Triumph motorcycles (there were no commercial links with the car company by this point, by the way), from 1956 he became the managing director of BSA, which also owned the Daimler car company. Turner set about rejuvenating the Daimler brand’s stodgy product range. One of his innovations was to design an all-new 2.55-litre V8 engine, which was originally intended for use in saloons, but in 1957 he also decided to market a new sports car, which he thought Daimler could make at the rate of between 1500 and 3000 cars a year.
The result, developed in a tearing hurry, was previewed in March 1959, and went on sale in September of that year. It was only then that the technical press were shown pictures of the new Daimler’s running gear, and noted just how like the Triumph TR3A installation it actually was. Not only was the layout of the chassis frame so very like that of the TR3A, but the front suspension components were all actually the very same – supplied, as I recall, by Alford & Alder of Hemel Hempstead. Other suspension, damping and braking components also seemed to have been 'reverse-engineered,' but the ever-discreet media of the day did not mention this.
Yet the two chassis were not, repeat not, the same, even if both were supplied by Rubery Owen of Darlaston in the Black Country. They were not the same in dimensions for sure – that of the SP250 had a 4in longer wheelbase and a 5in wider front track – but Salisbury of Birmingham provided both companies with rear axle assemblies. Daimler needed a manual gearbox for their new car, and because they were currently not building any manual transmissions of their own, they had to start again and although the casing and all its components were different, there was little doubt that these had been engineered by copying a complete TR gearbox, part by part. On the other hand, the Daimler car offered an automatic transmission option but no overdrive, while the TR3A offered overdrive but no automatic...
Incidentally, there seems to have also been just one case of the reverse engineering itself being reversed, because in that same period, when Triumph came to design their new TR3S Le Mans cars which had 160bhp twin-cam 'Sabrina' engines, they decided that their own rear axle would not take the strain. Accordingly they approached Salisbury, which happened to be able to supply the stronger SP250-type of components.
The abiding mystery though, which was not unravelled at the time and does not seem to have been explained in recent years, is that such a project really could not have been tackled so swiftly unless some bright engineer had been recruited in advance. Presumably they would have left Triumph in a hurry one Friday afternoon, turned up at Daimler on the Monday morning and begun the transformation.
All this, of course, misfired well before the SP250 had been on sale for less than a year, because the company was taken over by Jaguar. That company’s founder, Sir William Lyons, liked the V8 engine and used it in later models, but he hated the styling and the doubtful build quality of the SP250. As a result it was dropped in 1964 after a mere 2654 such cars had been manufactured.
But whatever happened to the design and development team at Daimler who produced the SP250 so bravely and so quickly? They did not all come forward to be recognised. Is there anyone still out there who might tell us more?