British sports-car makers come and go with the seasons, but we’re genuinely excited at the news that TVR will be resurrected—an effort that might actually take this time.
-TVR was never one of the more successful Brit manufacturers, but for a while it was among the most exciting. Founded back in 1947, the company entered its golden era after being bought by Peter Wheeler, a self-made engineering millionaire, who quickly reinvented the company in his own image: brash, punch, and proudly eccentric.
-A generation of handsome, fiberglass-bodied coupes and roadsters followed, powered initially by Rover engines and then later by straight-six and V-8 powerplants that TVR developed and built in-house. Reliability was often dodgy—even in the context of British sports cars—but the company enjoyed a dedicated following in Europe.
-No Wheeler-era TVRs were officially imported to the U.S, but several won fame through starring roles in early iterations of the Gran Turismo franchise, including the Griffith, the Cerbera, and the ludicrous 800-hp Speed 12 (which never made it into production). A TVR Tuscan also featured heavily in the 2001 action movie Swordfish, during which it pretty much acted John Travolta right off the screen.
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Wheeler sold the company in 2004 to Nikolai Smolenski, a 24-year old Russian billionaire’s son. Smolenski proved either unwilling or unable to invest in the development of new models and—after laying off most of the workforce—announced that he planned to move production to Italy. That didn’t happen, and the company folded in 2007 with various subsequent attempts to resurrect it coming to nothing.
-Until now. The brand has been bought by a group of investors, who announced that there will be a new TVR in 2017, with three more following by 2020. That sort of claim might bring no more than a roll of the eyes, except that both Gordon Murray and Cosworth are said to be involved. Murray is still best known as the designer of the McLaren F1, and his company’s innovative iStream production technique that uses a structural glass-matrix resin. Cosworth will be engineering the naturally aspirated, dry-sump V-8 that will power this new generation of TVRs.
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Other details are still sketchy. We won’t be seeing any images of the new car until later this year, although it has been reported that design work is being handled by another agency, not Gordon Murray Design. The official press release promises that the car will be rear-wheel-drive and have a manual transmission, with production to take place in the U.K. Pricing will be “consistent with TVR’s past market positioning and highly competitive within its segment,” and the company also wants to take the new cars racing.
-So now let’s hope that U.S. homologation is also one of the official project targets.
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from Car and Driver Blog http://ift.tt/1AL0Ia4
via Agya
