TR6 and Cobra – an unholy alliance?
The fun has gone out of visiting the increasingly unstable USA, and its covid is raging so the Canadian border with the USA will remain closed for much of this year. Rather like Yugoslavia in 1990, people living in the countries next door start looking at their options just in case, and that’s when it sank in that the surreal house price inflation in Vancouver, mostly created by sensible people moving money out of China into safe real estate, has given us some new options. It was also an eyeopener to find that living costs in Scotland are now half the price of Vancouver. I wouldn’t return to London, but I’m from Glasgow anyway and I’ve always liked it, so Glasgow is now the plan.
That created a new problem with exporting/ importing my Cobra, though. I lost my first Cobra to a recession. It was a Cobretti, rather a magnificent beast with a rude 5.6-litre Chevy 350 V8 and Jag axles.
I’ve written a couple of books and many review articles about Cobra replicas, and I’m bloody well entitled to drive one.
The Police Cobra project, brewed up over here and based on retired cop cars with their 4.6 Ford V8s, got to the prototype stage, which did a good job of revealing that this was a rubbish idea. The prototype sat in the garden for a while, until I discovered that propane has the same high octane rating as race fuel, so you can turbocharge engines to 40lbs without melting the pistons. I could, briefly, get 300bhp out of a 1.6 Mazda MX5 engine and build a lightweight Cobra based on the MX5 running gear with its excellent handling. But it would still just be a viciously fast and nasty four- cylinder. Do I really want an evil fibreglass MX5? Erm… no, I don’t.
The next plan was to continue with the Mazda axles – the 1.8 NB rear end will take 200+bhp – but using a lightweight alloy V8,
Chevy LS or 4.9 Rover. That was loosely booked in for a build with my friend Gavin in Calgary, as I have way too much going on here with the Rolls and Bentley projects. Then came the new prospect of taking the Cobra with me to the UK. In BC, the official car-building bumpf is a piece of cake – build your car, then take it to a local garage for a safety inspection. If it’s competently constructed and the brakes, steering and lights are satisfactory, they issue a new VIN and you’re good to go.
In the UK, the IVA test system is a nitpicking nightmare that many brand new cars would fail. I was involved in its inception, when invited German TÜV engineers said check the structure, brakes, steering and lights, good to go. Then the Brit clerks took over and it turned into absurd, paranoid, elfnsafety
nonsense. A friend failed at the third attempt recently because he pumped the tyres up, raising the rolling tyre radius and the speedo read less than 1mph too low. I have always had a problem with jobsworth authority, so avoiding this nightmare is worth an effort.
Fortunately, there is a way around it. The Cobra is not going to be a Cobra, it’s going to be a Triumph TR6. Modified UK classics are in two basic categories. If you cut a monocoque, even if you’re just making room for a Weber air filter on a Mini dashboard, you face an IVA test. However, if you start with a car that has a separate chassis and don’t change the main rolling chassis structure, you can do what you like with the bodywork. It’s a points system, and you need 8 points to avoid IVA.
Retaining the original chassis gets 5 points, the original front and back axles get 2 points, the original suspension gets 2 points. That’s enough, that’s more than 8 points.
TR6 rolling gear is not state of the art, but the Triumph front suspension design is fine and the rear suspension is an adequate and upgradable independent setup, especially as I’m looking at touring rather than racing anyway. The TR6 ladder chassis is a little thin and floppy, but I can box it and stiffen it within the rules. I’ll be adapting the central section of the Cobra’s spaceframe, foot boxes, dash hoop and rollover bars to fit around the TR6 chassis rails anyway, and when I bolt that lot down it will stiffen up the Triumph chassis significantly.
There is a five-litre Ford 302
V8 and a T5 manual gearbox waiting, and having bought (another!) rough donor TR6 already, I can usefully retain quite a lot of it in the Cobra – the steering with a new RHD rack, the pedal box, the wiring, even the fuel tank and exhaust system could be adapted.
If I own the car here in Canada for six months, it can be imported into the UK as a personal possession, so no duty or tax applies, and it doesn’t even need an MoT on arrival – it’s a 1972 TR6, so it just gets a set of 1972 plates and I drive it away from the docks after arranging insurance.
I’ll probably have to carry a copy of the VOSA and IVA bumpf in the car as the K-reg number plates will say it’s a TR6 and it certainly won’t look or sound like one, but the numbers will match up, and I will have complied with the law. However, I will take the TRbra through race scrutineering and an MoT to get qualified thirdparty inspections of the car, just in case I missed something.