T VR: WHAT NE X T ?
TVR chairman Les Edgar tells us how the new Griffith will capture the best of old TVR while avoiding past mistakes
Now the fanfare and dust has settled on the new Griffith’s launch, we speak to TVR’S Les Edgar about what lies ahead
Where did TVR’S rebirth all begin? In 2013, a dozen of us – all petrolheads, all successful in business, many of us competition licence holders – were playing with the idea of starting a car company to go racing. We’d looked at various marques that we might acquire to create something between Lotus and Aston Martin, and TVR fitted the bill but was seemingly beyond our grasp. Then a contact said: ‘I might be able to put you in touch.’
So I found myself talking to Nikolai Smolenski. He told me a couple of stories, one of which was that the car we wanted to make would cost £150k. He’d done a massive amount of research, but possibly not seen Gordon Murray Design and istream. The other story was that he’d been walking through Berkeley Square in London when a small kid came running up to him, kicked him in the shins and said: ‘ You killed TVR!’
So the tack I took with him was to say: ‘I will help you redeem yourself. Sell it to me and we’ll publicly say that you helped with the repatriation of TVR.’ I think it struck a
chord because a couple of days later he rang me up and we bought it for a not-unreasonable sum. The deal was done very quickly, in May 2013.
What did the deal get you? More than we thought. Initially we thought we were buying the name, the brand, all the trademarks and maybe some of the drawings. Then a large Transit van turned up and it was stuffed with paperwork and hard drives. It seemed that all the desks had been emptied. So we have surprisingly good build records, especially for the latter years. We also got the keys to a warehouse in Northants that was full of spares, so we immediately set up TVR Parts Ltd and we have reestablished TVR service centres, about 30 in the UK, 12 others worldwide.
What happened next? Getting started took about a year figuring out what to keep in terms of DNA. Getting Gordon Murray on board wasn’t simple, with a lot of due diligence to be done on his side. Cosworth, too, we needed for credibility. The istream concept came as a bonus – we weren’t aware of that. We wanted the car to be an uncomplicated drivers’ car, so a well- designed, well-balanced car with aero, and obviously if anyone knows about aerodynamics, it’s Gordon.
How did you get Gordon Murray on board? I said to him and his senior team: ‘I don’t know what you’re doing for the next few years, but I’m going to Le Mans.’ That kind of clinched it. Gordon has brought with him from Mclaren most of the team that he had for the F1 GT racing project for Le Mans. And it is our intent; you’re not a credible sports car maker unless you can prove you’re up there with the best of them, and that’s not F1, it’s GT racing. World Endurance is where a car that has had questionable reliability in the past should be. You just have to be careful it doesn’t suck away time and money from the core business.
What is istream? It’s a concept and a process, F1 technology in a road car. If you’ve seen the chassis images you might unfortunately think that the new car is just like old TVRS, with a tubular
steel chassis, but it’s not. The skeleton it purely there to locate the heavy bits – the engine, suspension, me! – which is difficult to do with a fully carbon car. As it is, the skeleton is as torsionally stiff as the Cerbera spaceframe. But then we bond in the carbon sandwich panels and the stiffness goes up to seven times that. We think it’s best in class.
What do you consider the Griffith’s rivals? There’s a number of ways of looking at that. On price, we compete with the base 911 and Cayman GT4, the Aston Martin Vantage and the V8 Jaguar F-type. On performance we should be up with or above all of them. And then there’s emotion. Why would you buy the Griffith rather than a 911? Because it’s British, because it’s not a Porsche. Because it’s bespoke, hand-built, but in the right way – it will be reliable! And also because it’s rare, a bit outrageous, noisy, rebellious. TVR can do things that others can’t. Where they’re defined, TVR can be anything.
Will it be everyday-useable, then? It has to be. I see it as being between a Lotus and an Aston, a proper GT with a 400-mile range, full leather, airconditioned. The sill is narrow so it’s easy for a lady to get in, or a 6ft 5in man. We have looked at the geometry of the driving position and the sight lines for everyone from 5th to 95th percentile – which happens to be my wife, who is 5ft 4in, and me. I’m not sure that ever happened before at TVR.
Who styled the car? David Seesing. We had hundreds of design sketches before David came along. We were trying to figure out what made a TVR a TVR, but that constantly changed through the years.
Nikolai was walking in London when a small kid came running up to him, kicked him in the shins and said: ‘You killed TVR!
Some owners have said the new car isn’t as outrageous as the Sagaris, but if you look at all the other cars TVR has made, they are generally quite simple and clean.
The first thing we did was get the istream chassis structure locked down. That was within six months of signing with Gordon. He said: ‘Don’t touch that and you’ll have a great-handling car.’ Frank Coppuck [ TVR technical director] spent a long time persuading him to make it 50mm wider so we could get the maximum rear wing width for racing – it’s based on the width of the standard car. Then we let the designer loose on the car, and then we got the aero sorted. It has side- exit exhausts because we wanted a flat underfloor. All the holes do something, aerodynamically.
It’s surprising that it has a rear spoiler, then? Yes. It’s a ground effects car but we needed the spoiler for traction – it’s more about downforce, about getting weight on the back of the car. The critical factors are bhp per ton and the absolute weight of the car. A key target is 400bhp per ton. That defines the performance. The other important stat for me is how fast it gets to 100mph and back again, and a lightweight car does very well in that, as long as you’ve got the traction. The biggest technical issues are traction and heat management. Avon are making us a bespoke tyre.
Do you have anyone on board to do the dynamic set-up? We do. But I can’t say who it is!
What level of legislation will the car comply with? European Small Series, which will allow us to make 1000 coupes and 1000 convertibles a year. There will be left- and right-hand- drive models from day one. The 500 launch editions are sold out. In fact we have 700 orders, and between 10 and 15 per cent of those are for left-hand drive.
How did the engine deal come about? You can genuinely say you are a car maker when you make your own engine, but we had to get away from ‘chocolate’ engines. The sorted Speed Six engine was great but it took ten years to get it right. We couldn’t afford to risk that again. Ford has supplied engines for 50 per cent of all TVRS and at the time [2014] was just introducing the new Mustang. It makes about three quarters of a million ‘Coyote’ V8s a year so it’s a proven engine. They were happy to supply, we just had to make it special. Enter Cosworth, who tick all the right boxes for me. It was important that we didn’t break open the engine, so we put on a lightweight flywheel, dry sump – allowing it to be 100mm lower in the car – and a new air intake, which helps enormously, and a new ECU. We’ve had a Mustang with the Cosworth drivetrain racking up the miles and we now have a Cerbera with it, which is outrageous. And the show car gets shaken down next week and becomes our first, fully representative prototype.
What’s the next big challenge in development? Crash testing is coming up, then ABS development, which needs hot and cold climates and takes nine months. One of the biggest unknowns is serviceability: access to service items as we productionise the car. We haven’t tackled that yet, and we will have to be a bit elastic; we don’t want to have to take the floor off to change the starter motor…
What about the factory in Ebbw Vale, south Wales? We take over the shell in mid-2018. We will set up the pilot build and be delivering cars by early 2019. We have decisions to make yet: do we build the chassis in-house? Do we have our own paint shop? I think we will have the latter, and it has to be a very, very good one. I can see us encouraging suppliers to set up nearby, too. At its height, when TVR was making around 1400 to 1500 cars a year in Blackpool, they employed nearly 800 people. We will employ 180 people to make 2000 cars a year.
The critical factors are bhp per ton and the absolute weight of the car. A key target is 400bhp per ton. That defines the performance
Les Edgar’s words should be music to the ears of those concerned about TVR’S rebirth. If everything goes to plan, the new Griffith promises to exceed the best TVRS past in terms of its driving experience, while adding that much-needed reliability. We’ll find out about the former in just over a year’s time, and the latter in the months after that.