THE TR7: A MISSED OPPORTUNITY

“The TR7’s had the biggest kicking of all cars except maybe the Allegro,” laughs Rich. “Mostly from people who have never tried one. The driveability is light years ahead of any other BL sports car of the era.” I tend to agree, despite once having taken some stick from a bunch of TR6 owners for stating in print that the TR7/8 was the best-driving of all the TRs. Harris Mann’s wedge shape still looks arresting today and an updated version could have been competitive well into the ’80s.

In reality it wasn’t the basic design which saw the TR7 to an early grave but the industrial unrest which saw production moved from Speke to Canley and then finally to Solihull, by which time a beleaguered BL had more important worries than a low-volume two-seater. Had it remained in production, the TR7 was to have formed the basis of an ambitious line-up which would have seen a Stag replacement spun off the same platform. Indeed, before production was moved from Speke, a fastback four-seater car on a stretched wheelbase had made it as far as preproduction. Known as Lynx, the car used the characteristic TR7 wedge front end, paired with a glass hatchback rear similar to the contemporary Toyota Corolla.

We’ve tried one of the V8-powered pre-production cars and can vouch that it would have been just right for the time and would have offered an interesting alternative in the medium-sized coupe market which was at the time served by the Capri, Scirocco, Alfetta GTV and very little else.

At the same time as the Lynx was canned, another proposed TR7 model also bit the dust: the 16-valve TR7 Sprint, powered by the same engine as found in the Dolomite Sprint.

Like the Lynx, a few Sprints were assembled as preproduction and then production cars, with some 30 vehicles in all seeing the light of day. The Sprint would have fitted into the range between the regular 2-litre car and the V8, being usefully more lively than the eight-valve TR7 but not as quick as the TR8 but with the move from Speke to Canley plus the lack of US certification for the engine, the plan was quietly dropped. Interestingly, the works rally cars fielded by BL until the advent of the V8 in 1979 were in fact TR7 Sprints.