The best endurance rally car
Malcolm McKay’s South American adventure in a robust Triumph TR2 led to him organising long-distance rallies
IT WAS A RUSTY restoration project found hidden in a London store, a distress sale after the 1991 recession. I’d done some European rallies in my Rochdale Olympic and realised that an open car would be more fun, as would a bit more ground clearance for gravel roads. As a Triumph man – my first car was a Herald – it had to be a TR and I loved the small-mouth TR2, but wanted it as original as possible. I was the only person rallying one on crossplies, but it was brilliant. You could still get Dunlop RS5s then and they were so lovely and progressive, any fool could do tailslides on them!
Then John Brown invited me to enter his 17,000-mile Inca Trail rally in 2001. I only found out afterwards that the organising team was betting on how far it would get… and none of them bet on my TR finishing! In fact it was going better at the end than most others, thanks to regular preventive maintenance.
The only major problem we had was the brand new Armstrong rear dampers failing on the first rough road – I should have left the originals on. I’d taken one original as a spare and it did the rest of the rally, but it was weeks before we received one for the other side. We had to drive very slowly on all the loose-surface climbs as the axle would start pattering.
The TR2 took the punishment incredibly well. In many ways it’s the best endurance rally car you could have because it’s so open and exposed that you really are out there in whatever environment you’re driving through. You feel the heat or cold, you smell the smells, you hear the sounds, you make eye contact with the locals, shout and wave – it’s like riding a bicycle without the pain! Plus, the Triumph is simple and tough – it didn’t complain about 75% ethanol in Brazilian petrol, or 83-octane fuel in Peru, and it’s built for rough roads – a simple steel grid protected the sump without affecting cooling, and it rode over almost everything. We pulled the exhaust apart once, crossing a closed bridge because there was no way we could ford the river, but because the exhaust goes through the chassis, it remained in situ until we had time to stop and reattach it.
The roads in the south of Argentina were rock – you couldn’t call those huge stones gravel. We had to press on as we were covering huge distances, so they pounded the chassis and the fronts of the rear wings – those alloy trims were worn away and the wings ended up with dents all over, from the inside out, too. The car now wears its scars with pride.
Afterwards, I started selling photos from rallies, then began organising them, starting with the 2008 50th anniversary Liège-BresciaLiège. After taking 52 microcars around Europe I could cope with pretty much anything and we now have events from Belgium to Slovenia to Italy, Spain, Andorra, Ireland and Scotland for Jaguar XKs and E-types, microcars, Porsches, MGs and – of course – Triumph TRs.