‘I wanted to do something completely new’
Harris Mann led the team that designed BL’S all-new sports car for the Seventies. Given a tricky brief, he arguably broke new styling ground in the process
By far the most significant vehicle from the British point of view is the Triumph TR6 replacement,’ stated CAR in its July 1974 issue as it assessed the new models appearing in the year ahead. In the wake of the international oil crisis of September 1973 that had shocked the car industry to its core, for British Leyland to come out fighting with a new sports car to replace much of its ageing, Fifties-rooted lineup was a bold statement of intent.
Responsibility for spearheading this bold lunge into a new, uncertain era rested on the shoulders of designer Harris Mann, and he was clear from the start that the design of the new Triumph TR7 could not owe anything to the past. ‘I didn’t want to go back into history with the TR7,’ says Mann today from his home in Worcestershire. ‘This old-fashioned attitude was a problem at BL. I came from Ford, which always made its cars look as modern as possible, and when I first arrived at Austin in the late Sixties, I was shocked by the ancient design themes it was still clinging to.’
Development of a TR7 was already underway when Mann was parachuted into Triumph’s design department from his established position in the Austin-morris division, fresh from replacing the old-fashioned chrome-and-curves ADO16 range with the compromised but futuristic Allegro, to head up the project. ‘They were struggling to come up with new ideas, and I wanted to do something completely new,’ says Mann. ‘As far as sports cars were concerned, it was a new era. There were a lot of mid-engined cars coming out of Italy at the time. Their packaging and technology resulted in a completely different kind of approach to design, and against that backdrop we couldn’t give the TR7 a traditional look.
‘Subconsciously, I was influenced by the Lancia Stratos,’ Mann admits. ‘That car, with its very low front end and interesting body design features, gave a completely new look to the sports car. Although at the time the designer who influenced me most of all was Giorgetto Giugiaro. He was really good at coming up with very interesting, unique concepts, and the Maserati Merak was his latest design at the time, although I can honestly say that it wasn’t in my mind at all when I did the TR7.’
The dramatic downward-plunging swage lines sculpted into the sides of the TR7 were added to the design relatively late in the process, and although controversial when new they’ve since become more commonplace among designers seeking to add a sense of nose-down dynamism to their shapes. It’s seen most successfully on the recent Ford Fiesta. ‘It just came out of my mind, it didn’t owe anything to anyone else,’ says Mann as he muses on it today. ‘I saw myself as an artist, coming up with something no-one had done before. It wasn’t pre-determined by any other car design elements – that was very deliberate.’
Looking back at that CAR feature of 1974 though, its anonymous writer drawing upon equally anonymous BL sources to build a picture of this new world-beater, it had an imposing design brief to live up to. ‘Instead of replacing its three-model sports-car range, Triumph seem certain to opt for just two,’ the feature claimed. ‘The lower-powered version will be equipped with the Dolomite Sprint engine, which meets emissions regulations in Europe and America, and can be as economical as the 1.3-litre Spitfire when hooked up to a lightweight car, high gearing and overdrive. In effect
this will take over the role of both Spitfire and GT6. To replace the TR6, however, Triumph will install the Rover 3.5-litre V8.’
Mann is dismissive of the notion that the car was intended to replace the Spitfire – which in the event remained in production alongside the TR7 throughout its production lifetime in 1500 form – but admits he had little say over the car’s mechanical underpinnings, an issue which plagued his Allegro design. ‘I was asked to propose a TR6 replacement, nothing else. I was given a package of information to design it around – engine mass, axle locations, radiator height et cetera – and that was it.’
The mechanical design of the car was cheapened during the design process. CAR’S feature promised independent rear suspension and all-round disc brakes, something dropped in favour of a live axle and rear drums to save costs by the time the car made production. Only 61 cars ultimately ended up with the Sprint engine too, the basic production TR7 winding up with a simpler eight-valve Dolomite 2.0-litre.
One element that compromised Mann’s vision for the car was the roof design. ‘No convertible was originally planned,’ he reveals. ‘It was the main reason for replacing the TR6 because it had no roll-over protection, and Federal regulations dictated a level of crash protection it couldn’t meet.
‘But the original TR7 design, devised before I joined the project and designed along Stag lines, featured a T-bar roof with removable hardtop panels. However, when I proposed one for my TR7, for some reason Triumph’s engineers suddenly said they couldn’t engineer it. Yet at the time, my wife owned a Mazda coupé with removable roof panels that fitted into nice little bags that you could put in the boot. I figured that if Mazda could work these things out, why couldn’t we? Nevertheless, the engineers dropped my idea and put in a hardtop with a big sunroof instead.
‘It was a big compromise, and I think a lot of decisions were made by older engineers thinking along the lines of, “We’ve never done that before so it’s too much work to try and do it now,” whereas Japanese
‘Decisions were made by older engineers saying, “It’s too much work”’
engineers would follow a concept right through from design to production and make it work. They still do, and it’s a great regret that British manufacturing didn’t learn from the Japanese sooner.’
Interestingly, CAR’S report actually addressed Mann’s T-roof issue, claiming, “Although a Targa top was tried, it was abandoned because of the need for greater body rigidity.” However, it also pointed out that, “[Triumph has] been running, experimentally, a Fiat X1/9 and a Porsche 914” – both of which were mass-produced cars with removable roof panels.
Triumph finally built a convertible TR7 from 1978 after the anticipated US regulations that might have killed off roofless cars never made it onto the statute books. ‘There were no specific Us-wide rules confirmed during the design process, but there were certain requirements in individual American States, so the TR7 had to comply with all of them,’ says Mann. ‘There were the bumpers, which had to be designed so that the car could crash at 5mph and drive away undamaged, but there were also front and side-impact protection beams, something that’s still very much a part of car design today. The Americans had created a test rig that swung a pendulum into the car at a certain height, and no intrusion damage could be allowed. Also, the petrol tanks had to be moved forward after the Ford Pinto debacle – it’s the reason why the TR7’S fuel filler is in the odd place it is, just behind the rear windscreen rather than on the rear wing.’ The 1972 Pinto’s fuel tank was sited in the crumple zone between rear axle and bumper, resulting in a risk of explosion in rear-end impacts. ‘Steering
assemblies also needed joints putting in them, so they didn’t send the steering column into the driver in a front-end impact.
‘Unfortunately, because BL wasn’t an American company, we didn’t get any of this information supplied to us by the US government, so we had to rely on information from our importers, and as a result it came to us in bits, which complicated the design process. And to add to that it was a short development programme anyway. The TR6 had hung on for so long, it was outdated at launch, and the regulation deadline was coming in 1974, governing the time we had to work on its replacement. There was an urgent message of, “Get on with it!” coming from the management. We got the TR7 from concept to production in just two years, and nearly all the early cars went to the US first to meet demand – you couldn’t even buy a TR7 in the UK during its first year of production.’
Mann is still very proud of arguably his best-known and, retrospectively, best-appreciated car design. ‘Whatever people think of TR7S, Triumph still sold more of them than any other TR,’ he states, before adding controversially, ‘also, the earlier TRS drove like lorries! They were just so physical, they were hard to drive and the chassis flexed badly. They didn’t offer a modern driving experience and by the time the TR6 came out it was dreadfully old-fashioned. And the Americans picked up on this, didn’t like it and stopped buying them. By contrast, the TR7 was a sales success.’
It was ultimately a convertible too, of course, although Mann wasn’t involved in the creation of the final version. ‘Unbeknownst to me, a TR7 coupé was sent to Giovanni Michelotti in Italy. I wasn’t on the project any more then, I’d gone back to Austin, but there was certainly a belief within Triumph that Michelotti could do anything. He basically cut the roof off and sent it back. Why a job like that couldn’t have been done in Coventry, with its plethora of local coachbuilders I don’t know, but Triumph boss Harry Webster would send Michelotti work whenever he could.’
But was the TR7 a truly successful piece of design and engineering? ‘They should have used a bigger engine from the start,’ says Mann without hesitation. ‘I was not party to any decisions regarding the engine and gearbox. I don’t think it was foreseen that the car would always have a V8, but one certainly fitted.’
CAR was confident enough to put the headline, ‘TR7: It’s Triumph’s secret V8!’ on its front cover, and Mann is unconvinced by arguments concerning the viability of V8 engines post-oil crisis; ‘It wouldn’t have restricted its sales in the US – quite the opposite,’ he states. ‘Despite the effects of the oil crisis Americans kept buying V8s, especially from domestic manufacturers. There was, however, a drive to import small cars from Europe and Japan at the time, to plug a gap in the US market that the Americans weren’t plugging themselves. The TR7 fitted right into it.’