STAG ROARS AGAIN
The Triumph Stag celebrates its 50th birthday this year. This example shows the excellence the design might have achieved had British Leyland given it half the care and attention Dunedin couple Glynn and Alison Gaston put into this restoration
In 1964, Michelotti asked Triumph for a pre-production Mk2 2000 sedan that he could use as a basis for a styling special for the 1966 Turin Motor Show. His effort never made the show because Triumph’s director of engineering and development, Harry Webster, was so pleased with the eye-catching design that he took the prototype straight home, keen to evaluate it for production. Buoyed by the sales success of its sports cars in the US market, Triumph expected a warm welcome for a new upmarket design. It saw the Stag as a potential competitor for the top convertible models from
Mercedes-benz and Alfa Romeo. The Stag — at least early on, before it got other nicknames — was sometimes referred to as ‘The Midlands Mercedes’.
Not helping its protracted development was the transfer of Webster to Austin-morris, with Rover’s Spen King coming on board to manage
the project. Early prototypes used Triumph’s 2.5-litre saloon’s driveline then later a new fuel-injected V8 engine intended for a new range of Triumph 3000 saloons. The new motor, designed by Lewis Dawtrey, had a capacity of 2.5 litres and was fuel injected. Leyland opposed the new V8 and pushed for Rover’s new alloy Buick-sourced 3.5-litre V8 to be used.
Leyland actually had an excess of V8 engines. Following the merger with Jaguar in 1966, it acquired Daimler’s 2.5- and 4.5-litre Turner V8s and various experimental Jaguar military V8s from the 1950s, alongside Rover’s all-alloy V8. It didn’t need another. However, Triumph questioned Rover’s capacity to supply its own needs and Stag production. It also knew Rover was tinkering with a new mid-engine two-door design that would use the V8. Meanwhile Leyland boss Lord Stokes had cancelled the Daimler engines, citing excessive production costs.
So the Stag engine went ahead and developed a woeful reputation because of a couple of faults that could have been easily rectified with proper development. These were an oil gallery prone to blocking, which caused wear in the single-row timing chain, and some poorquality alloy cylinder-head casting, even though the engine was basically two Dolomite engines wedged together and they had proved robust enough.
Further problems included inadequately sized main bearings and drive gears to the water-pump shearing. The pump was driven by skew gears on a jackshaft high in the middle of the V of the engine, which also drove the oil pump and distributor. To make matters worse — that it is to say, catastrophic — the filler was below the top of the engine, so if it overheated the system was often under-filled, starving the pump of water and leading to a terminal meltdown.
Launched in 1970, Triumph’s new Stag was well received, but it wasn’t long before these issues began to impact on its reputation and the expected 12,000 units a year never eventuated. This led to the Stag’s other nickname, ‘The Triumph Snag’.
A signature of the Stag’s design was its T-roof bar, which added bracing for the bodywork and roll-over protection for the occupants — a handy feature as US legislation swerved to safety consciousness. Initially made detachable, it was soon a fixture. It still allowed softtop and open-roof motoring following removal of the heavy hardtop. King
The Stag engine went ahead and developed a woeful reputation because of a couple of faults that could have been easily rectified with proper development
also had the wheelbase shortened by six inches (152mm). Triumph’s bothersome mechanical fuel was withdrawn and replaced with dual Zenith-stromberg carburettors. It produced less torque with this arrangement, so the engine was bored well oversquare to 2997cc. The bodies were built at Speke in Liverpool for final assembly in Canley, Coventry. This didn’t help shortcomings in assembly quality, but it was the engine issues that most hurt the company’s flagship, and they were not swiftly addressed as they should have been, as management was focused on getting the government bailout it received in 1974.
A HAPPY ENDING
When production ceased in 1977, just 25,939 Stags had been built. Without the finance to develop the engine, production of the Stag had to cease and this handsome car quickly achieved almost cult-like status. Where Leyland failed, a band of diehard enthusiasts such as UK engineer Tony Hart succeeded in mending the Stag’s broken heart. Tony formed a British Stag Owners Club in 1979, with associated clubs worldwide. Hart Racing also showed that the little V8 was quite a performer in its racing class. Hart’s severely modified Stag proved competitive on UK motor racing tracks. He was convinced that the Stag engine was basically a strong unit but that it was “intolerant of sloppy workmanship and lack of maintenance”. Now with a new owner, his car still competes in classic motor racing events and has recently been fully restored. A point Stag owners are keen to make is that almost half of all Stags ever built are still on the road.
LAST CHANCE SALOON
The Triumph Stag featured here has been lovingly restored from what was once, in the owner’s words, “a horrible, terrible job”. Owners Glynn and Alison Gaston hail from Dunedin, and along with their grandchildren now enjoy cruising in the Stag after a threeand-a-half-year restoration.
In 2011, Glynn was looking for a classic car to restore. After 21 years with Air New Zealand he was working as a Super Shuttle driver, with four days on and four days off, which gave him the time to take on such a project — something he had always wanted to do.
“I’d looked at quite a few cars over the years. The idea was to restore a car as something to keep me going. I had looked at different MGS, and I would have quite liked an Austin-healey
A signature of the Stag’s design was its T-roof bar, which added bracing for the bodywork and rollover protection
“I had a friend of a friend pop around and have a look at it … He said it was pretty rough and needed a lot of work”
or something similar but they were really expensive.
“Then I saw a Stag and I thought, Ah, this is nice. This is what I would like. So I looked at different ones for about two years, I suppose, then this one came up in Taupo. I had a friend of a friend pop around and have a look at it for me. He said it was pretty rough and needed a lot of work done to it but it appeared to be quite straight and didn’t seem to have much rust. ‘Right,’ I said. ‘I’ll take it’, so that was that.”
First registered in March 1974, this Triumph Stag Mk1 model was actually built in 1973. Its previous owner, the fourth, bought the car in 1981. Being close to the Mk2 version, he found it had a number of Mk2 fittings, something Triumph did to save costs. That owner had the car for 24 years, leaving it to his son in 2009. The son finally decided it was too much work to restore it and put it up for sale.
“There was quite a bit of interest but people saw it and decided it was too much work,” says Glynn.
Glynn fetched the Stag home on 19 April 2011. It’s fair to say his first sighting of it gave him a bit of a shock.
“I got a transporter for it from Taupo to Picton and my brother-in-law and I took a trailer to Picton. When we arrived, it was sitting on a pallet in the Picton yard. It was originally white and somebody had painted it silver! It was horrible; a terrible job! I don’t think they even scraped back the white paint or anything; they just sprayed silver over it. It was disgusting,” he laughs — now.
The tyres were flat, the brakes were seized, and it couldn’t be moved. The transport-yard operator came to the rescue with a forklift and the Stag was unceremoniously forked onto the trailer. The pair then headed back to Alison’s sister’s place in Blenheim to show off Glynn’s purchase, albeit with mixed feelings.
“Ali took a look at it and said it was pretty much what she expected for the price. Then she says to me that I am not to work on it all the time. ‘Oh no, I won’t do that’, I said. ‘Hell no!’ For my entire four days off for the next three-and-a-half years, I worked on that car. I wasn’t terribly popular there for a wee while but at least it was all done at home.”
RINGING IN HIS EARS
In May 2011, with a reminder from Alison not to spend too many nights in the garage still ringing in his ears, Glynn set about stripping the Stag. He reckons that the worst job was jacking up the car, crawling underneath with a water blaster, and removing the thick black underseal. A plus was that the underside of the Stag was almost rustfree. It was cleaned and prepped and a fresh coat of underseal was applied. After stripping the interior trim, Glynn removed the wiring loom, which was mostly complete.
“I pulled the wiring harness out and some of the wires were not very good,” he says. “The ballast resistor they have on those things had overheated and had melted a lot of the wires, so I ripped all that out and put an external ballast resistor in — a lot better that way.”
The old coil-type relays were replaced with electronic ones. Relays were added to the headlights to save costly electrical shorts, and that avoided having to run full power through the steering-column switches. Glynn chose LED bulbs for the tail lights.
The rest of the body was in pretty good shape with little rust. The bottoms of both doors were rusted out, however, and new sections were welded in. There