DOLOMITE RESTORED
Murdo’s mission to Sprint delight
I’ve been a Ford man all my life and had an RS1600I right up until we built this workshop with the house attached (yes, that’s the way we see it) and it went over-budget, so the car had to go. Having promised my son, Fraser, we’d buy another car when we were back on our feet, I found the RS1600I I’d sold for £4k in 2010 had risen to £16k in 2017, so I was priced out of Fords. However, the first car that made an impression on me was a Sprint, so I decided that I was going to look for an original example. I then found it wouldn’t be easy.
Finding this car was the jammiest thing: the seller only put two lines in PC sister title Classic Car Weekly with no photo, so nobody paid attention to it. A mate in London looked at it for me and told me to get down there as soon as possible – I live in the Outer Hebrides, but was on the plane the next day. This Triumph Dolomite Sprint was one of the last, built on June 26, 1980. It is absolutely phenomenal, too. How a used Triumph survived in this condition, I have no idea.
You can look anywhere and you won’t even find any surface rust. I could see that the car had never been touched – it was completely original, but some of the paint had faded, so there was a debate as to whether I should spray it or not. To avoid a mismatch, I decided to paint the whole car, but leave the engine bay and the floors.
Inside job
Robert Hughson, who sprayed the car, advised that we painted inside the door shuts so you didn’t see a difference, so the doors came off. Then we asked ourselves, do we alter the door gaps? Triumph ones were appalling. I was looking at a genuine 79-mile car at the NEC show and that one’s shuts were the same. They were really ahead of their time, but the build quality was awful. You can still see a paint-run on a suspension turret, too. I’ve spoken to the garage-owner who sold the car, who told me they’d made a fair bit of money putting the new cars right before selling them to the customers. Two doors weren’t too bad, so we made the decision to make all the door gaps right. Triumph couldn’t even cut the carpet mats right; mine and the car I saw at the NEC have exactly the same problem.
I haven’t had to go through the mechanical side of things because the previous owner’s family was worried the car might be sold for banger racing when it came out of storage, so they paid a lot to have the brakes and all the fluids renewed, and get it MOT’D. The car’s not finished yet as I need to clean the engine and bay. It will just be hours and hours and hours of painstaking cleaning. It’s not appealing to most people, but I enjoy it.
Originality is very important but so is preservation, so I’ve had to renew some things. I had the wheel centres re-chromed, I bought new mirrors, I’ve renewed all the rubber body seals, and the front lights needed replacing, which was painful. I had to pay £156 for just one indicator. Absolutely criminal. Triumph parts are a real nightmare, and a lot of the repro bits are rubbish. I just look on ebay and wait.
I’m aiming for a car that’s almost concours but can still be used. It has been kept dry for two years, so I’ll clean underneath and protect it with Dinitrol, which is close to the original Ziebart.
Yes, I am going to use it, but when it does get used, it will come back into the garage and be cleaned. I’ve spoken to lots of people on various forums and asked how they define a respray, and the majority have agreed that what I’ve done is maintenance and is no different to changing the timing belt if you had to, for example. I’m happy with that.