More on the TVR Buick

Derry Gibb’s letter (Shelsley’s Wall of Death, December 2021) fills a gap in my knowledge of the TVR Buick. In return I can provide a little information.

I helped Brian Alexander transform the TVR from MGB to Buick power in 1967/68 and was one of a trio who mis-spent their teenage years in Bisley (the Gloucestershire one) messing around with old cars and motorbikes. It was one of our number – after he left us untimely – from whose barn the TVR was recently disinterred after a 40-year hibernation.

The Vauxhall Cresta gearbox was suggested by Brian’s friend Geoff Taylor, who hillclimbed a Daimler V8-engined Grantura. It was always marginal in competition use but was chosen for its reasonably spaced ratios. As the photo shows, we moulded front and rear wheelarch extensions to cover the 10in wide banded steel wheels with Dunlop racing tyres. Given that they were done in a single garage, without space to stand back and see what we were doing, they turned out quite well! It did have a roll bar, of a design and gauge that might have withstood a gentle inversion.

Occasionally the car was trailered to meetings but often it was driven to hill climbs and sprints on its racing wheels and tyres. In the days before downforce and rock-hard suspension it was a surprisingly comfortable road car, with its own characteristic aroma of warm glassfibre resin and Duckhams Q 20W-50. What now boggles the mind is that we drove to meetings with the space behind the seats filled with trolley jack, steel toolboxes and cans of petrol and oil. No possible jeopardy there then!

John Coles