Del Lines Stag Estate

On the Coast to Coast run in a special Triumph estate with Stag running gear.

We join Alan Chatterton, former chairman of the 2000/2500/2.5PI Register, on Club Triumph’s Coast to Coast Run, in an estate car that was sold as a Stag. Even Triumph aficionados could be forgiven for getting a little confused by that lot, so read on and we’ll see if we can unravel the mystery!

Let’s start our story with the car. To the casual observer, this simply looks like a very nice example of a Mk2 Triumph 2.5PI estate. However, as soon as you hear the engine running, the distinctive exhaust note tells you that it has a Triumph V8 engine under the bonnet rather than the standard-fit straight six. That is not unheard of these days as a number of enterprising owners have given their cars engine transplants, but this one is a little different.

The man behind it was Ian Lines, always known as Del, who ran Atlantic Garages in Weston-super- Mare. In 1973 Del started to buy new 2000/ 2500 shells from Leyland, fit them with factory-returned Stag engines that were rebuilt either by Richard Longman or Downton Tuning, complete the cars with a mixture of new and secondhand trim then knock them out as new cars, registered under Atlantic Garages chassis numbers.

After a while, Leyland got the hump because Del was marketing his cars as Stag Estates. They refused to sell him any more bodyshells, so Del then started converting customer cars instead. Del never was one for accurate records, but we think there were about 26 new saloons and estates, and maybe another 40 or 50 conversions on customer cars.

Alan’s car was the very first to be converted in this way, and it has always been known within Triumph circles as DEL 33, after the private number Del had on it for a while. So far so good, but why call it a Stag Estate rather than simply a V8 Estate?

‘How Del did it I don’t know, but all the cars were registered as Triumph Stag Estates or Stag Saloons,’ says Alan. ‘Because this was the first one, it doesn’t have an Atlantic Garages chassis number and still carries the original Triumph one for a white 2.5PI estate, but the logbook was changed at the time and it was registered as a Stag Estate. I have had criticism for calling it a Stag, but that was how it was

sold and marketed, that is what it says on the logbook, and it has Stag badges all over it.’

Fair enough. And since this is one of only four known survivors, it is important that this heritage is honoured. Alan has certainly done that. He learnt of it being for sale just before Christmas 2009, and went to Switzerland with a hired trailer and £2000 in his pocket to fetch it home.

‘The car was incomplete but restorable,’ he recalls. ‘ The shell was surprisingly sound, straight and watertight. The sills had gone, as had the rear arches where they had been pulled (only the first three Stag Estates had flared rear arches), but the floors were perfect which was a pleasant surprise. I knew it was going to cost me a small fortune to restore, but I also knew that I’d not get another chance to buy an original Del Lines car. I had thought it would take a year and £10,000. In the end it took five years and £25,000.’

That work involved restoring the car very much as it was built by Del, so for example Alan ditched the automatic gearbox that had been fitted to the car for its second owner and put it back to the original manual/ overdrive specification. He has not copied every detail slavishly though, because the plan was always to use the car extensively rather than to create a museum piece. So the suspension is the original equipment, all cleaned, repainted and refurbished, but while the car would originally have had 2.5PI brakes at the front and the wider Stag brakes at the back, Alan has gone with Stag brakes at the front as well – pads are the same on both the 2000/ 2500 and the Stag, but the Stag discs are about 1in bigger in diameter.

Arguably Del Lines would have done the same, but the 2000/ 2500 came with 13in wheels and there wasn’t room for Stag discs under them. Del actually fitted extremely wide band gold 13in Minilites to this car, but they had long since disappeared by the time Alan got it. Unable to find anyone who would make up some replicas, he fitted 15in Revolution wheels instead which, as well as making room for the bigger Stag brakes at the front, also opened the door to modern rubber. The original 13in wheels sound tiny on such a big car, but they looked right at the time because they would have had such high sidewalls on the tyres to fill out the arches – nice and comfy, but nice and wibbly-wobbly too. Alan has gone for 205- 65-15 tyres on his 15x7in Revolutions – he didn’t want to go all rubber-band as

that would have looked silly, but by going up two inches on the rim size and then down a couple of inches on the tyres, it is all nicely balanced.

The car had been built with a 3.7 limited-slip differential originally, but it came back from Switzerland with a standard estate 3.45 diff. Alan may have to change that back to a 3.7 because he chose an uprated 28% overdrive unit from Mike Papworth, along with Stag gears which were designed to be used with the 3.7 back end. Factor in the bigger 15in wheels and this is one very tall- geared car – great for continental cruising with just 2500rpm on the tacho when cruising at 80mph, but losing a little bit of sparkle off the line.

Which brings us neatly onto the driving experience and our participation in Club Triumph’s Coast-to- Coast Run. Now, some marque clubs are extremely territorial and members of one group will have little to do with any of the competition. Not all clubs of course, and you only have to look at umbrella organisations such as the Association of Rootes Car Clubs to see how some have chosen cooperation over competition.

There will inevitably be some remaining tensions of course, but generally speaking the Triumph clubs have followed a similar path and the individual clubs tend to be differentiated by the models they cater to or the type of services they offer. In Club Triumph’s case, their forte is long distance driving events such as the biennial Round Britain Reliability Run or the Ten Countries Run through Europe. As a result, many Triumph enthusiasts belong to more than one club.

Alan is one such enthusiast, and a veteran of 11 RBRRs. The Coast-to- Coast Run is a recent addition to the calendar, though. For many years CT organised the Historic Counties Run, an overnight navigational scatter rally that would see entrants covering roughly 400 miles between dinner and breakfast in a kind of automotive orienteering. Last year they decided to change the format and organised an overnight run from Holyhead in North Wales to Southwold on the Suffolk coast (hence the Coast-to- Coast name) to coincide with the FBHVC’s national Drive It Day.

This was so popular that for April 2019, indefatigable organiser Chris Shaw put together a run starting from Ravenglass in the Lake District on the Saturday evening and finishing with breakfast on Sunday morning at Bicester Heritage Centre in time for their DID Sunday Scramble event.

Of course the C2C did not follow a direct path between these two points, but instead took entrants on a devious route up through the North Pennines, then across the country to Whitby. After a refreshment stop a little further down the coast at Scarborough, everybody headed across the Humber Bridge and down the east side of Lincolnshire as far as Louth, before finally turning inland and making a beeline southwest towards Bicester.

I should point out that the C2C is non- competitive and definitely not a race. There are no awards, no restrictions on navigational aids and no check points. It is simply a chance for enthusiasts to meet socially, to drive some great roads and to push both themselves and their cars a little harder than is normally the case. It is in fact the perfect preparation for either the RBRR or the 10CR!

Alan was looking for a codriver, and when he dangled the keys to such a famous car in front of me, I didn’t need to be asked twice. Don’t worry though, because I don’t propose to give you a stepby-step account of some 450

miles behind the wheel. Instead I would like to pick a few highlights that will hopefully give a flavour of what it is like to drive a Del Lines Stag Estate.

That flavour starts with a little shimmy as we step on the gas while crossing a wet cattle grid – the car is generally so refined that it is easy to forget just how much power you have beneath your right foot. This cattle grid marks the start of our climb up the Hardknott Pass between Eskdale and the Duddon Valley. Neither of us are prepared for quite how spectacular this is – it just goes up and up and up, a single lane switchback to rival anything in the Alps, if perhaps not quite as long. It gets narrower and steeper as we go up, and the turns get tighter. We can see other Triumphs ahead as they twist and turn, then they disappear for a time before re- emerging another 100 feet higher up.

Immediately ahead of us is a 2000 automatic, and we can see the inside wheel spinning as it lifts on the sharp turns. We too lose momentum at one point as the inside wheel scrabbles for grip, one of the few occasions since the rebuild when Alan's thought spending £1500 or so on an LSD could be worth the investment. The 3.45 diff is quite tall for climbing – in a standard car you would be in second and third gear for a lot of this Pass, but we spend much of the climb in first and second. Fortunately there is more than enough power and torque from the Stag engine to overcome this, particularly when the car is lightly loaded as it is today.

The road coming down the other side of the pass is just as steep, but now it is the brakes that are put to the test. The car has EBC Greenstuff pads, and Alan would like to say he chose them because of their advanced material and extra stopping ability, but has to admit that the real reason was because they don’t put brake dust on the wheels! ‘Everyone swears by Mintex 1144 pads and they really do stop well, but after 20 miles you’ve got black wheels,’ he says. ‘Greenstuff pads last a whole lot longer too.’ And I can report that they are more than man enough to slow this big beast down, even on roads as steep and treacherous as these.

As we come down from the adrenalin high induced by the Hardknott Pass and settle into cruising along more conventionally angled roads, I can hear a strange knocking noise from above me. ‘That is coming from the sunroof drains that run back the length of the roof and then down the D-pillars,’ says Alan. ‘For some reason when they fill up with water, that is just enough to make them sag and they start to bang a bit.’ We’ll call that character, shall we?

During the rebuild, Alan had some mild porting done to the heads, just taking away any rough edges, equalising the combustion chambers and opening the ports out a little. It was nothing dramatic, but it does make a difference and the car pulls really well. What surprises me though is how natural this combination of big estate and V8 engine feels. It is powerful but extremely civilised, an easy car to drive with good soundproofing and ample assistance from the power steering despite a tiny 14in Mountney wheel.

‘The steering column has a non- PS column joint in it which doesn’t have a rubber coupling, because on this conversion that would have been too close to the exhaust,’ explains Alan. ‘ That rubber coupling provides some insulation, so this one does transmit a faint nose from the power steering system that makes it sound like it could be low on fluid, even though everything is fine. I had the original rack reconditioned, but it was always too light – at

speed it just felt like you were continually chasing the car over the road. I kept it like that for two years, but then exchanged it for another reconditioned rack. There is no rhyme or reason as to whether a recon rack will be light or heavy, it just seems to be down to luck of the draw. I think that is because racks have been swapped and rebuilt over the years, and whereas they were originally slightly different from one application to another with different valves and so on, now it is a case of one size fits all.’

As for the exhaust note, this is best described as ‘quietly purposeful.’ It is essentially a standard stainless steel Stag system with an extra nine inches added in the middle, the rear floor on this car having been modified by Del Lines to fit the two silencers. ‘I cobbled the system together out of homebrew bits so the car would drive, then had it made by Custom Chrome in Nuneaton,’ says Alan. ‘Surprisingly, there is not that much difference lengthwise between the estate and the Stag, only about six inches, but it is all bonnet and boot on the Stag. I’ve seen people with four adults in a Stag, but that is a challenge.’

No such worries in the estate, which is narrow by modern standards but still cavernous on the inside. Which makes it surprising just how easy this car is to drive and to place on the road – a low waistline, slim pillars and large glass area give the kind of visibility that designers these days cannot even begin to imagine. However, some of you might be wondering where the pleasure comes from driving through the night, even if the car itself is an absolute delight. I can understand that, but as I wrote after completing last year’s C2C in my Acclaim, while you are denied the grand vistas of daytime, driving at night has its compensations. For one thing, roads that invariably condemn you to a stop/start crawl during the day can be a free-flowing delight at night. There is also a certain magic about being alone on the road, enjoying a window into a rarely glimpsed nocturnal world as your lights cut a path through the tree-lined darkness, owls swooping overhead or the occasional hare popping up on the verge an added bonus.

And then too there is the chance to spend time with friends, just chatting and shooting the breeze. You can learn a lot about people at times like that, as well as about their cars. Sometimes slightly more than you would choose to know, like the tale Alan told me as we cut through the darkness somewhere near Middlesborough. ‘This car was on the Register’s stand at the NEC in 2015,' he said, 'and an old lady wandered around it before asking: “Is this really Del’s car?” I was amazed a little old lady recognised it, but then she went on to explain why, saying: "Back in the day, I was Del Lines’ girlfriend. I’ve had sex in the back of that car!" That is why some people now unkindly refer to it as the Shag estate.’

Hmmm, perhaps that would have made a more arresting title for this piece...