A bright red TR3A. The peak of the early postwar export or die British sports car boom. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Don’t rev your engines, it bothers the neighbors and there is all those adult beverages to think about.
The aesthetics of the stamp is great because it is a good looking car. But modern. By then in 1996 the British motoring industry was out of affordable sports cars. If the challenge was export or die, then death was chosen. As such, there is a touch of the melancholy.
The stamp today is issue A470, a 20 Pence stamp issued by Great Britain on October 1st, 1996. The stamp displays a late 1950s vintage Triumph TR3A. It was part of a 4 stamp issue in various denominations celebrating the history of British sports cars from the 1950s period. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth 30 cents in it’s used state.
With Britain war ravaged goods that could be exported and thereby restore wealth were prioritized. The basis of the Triumph line was fairly prosaic. The separate frame of the car was adopted from a pre war family saloon from the companies Standard line. The suspension was adopted from the new post war smaller sedan called the Mayflower. Yes they called it the Mayflower because they hoped to export it to America. The engine was a pushrod unit from Standard’s new larger sedan, the Vanguard.
This is not to say it was not a proper sporting machine but rather that it was built to sell overseas at a reasonable price. Triumph may have wanted you to think of a dashing Duke’s son as the proper driver, but it was available at a lower price. The USA price was $2675, a little less than $25,000 in todays money.
Triumph did a lot to the basic design to give a proper sporting experience. The frame rails allowed the bucket seats to be quite low. It lowered the cars center of gravity but more importantly made the driver feel in more contact with the road. The doors were severely cut down and roll up windows were replaced by seldom used plastic side curtains as on a Jeep. The engine was tuned up to 90 horsepower from dual carburetors, and sport exhaust. The sedan version of the same engine made 69 horsepower. The engine, though still an economical 4 had much more displacement than the cars German and Italian competitors. In combination with the available electric overdrive, it made the car much more suited to sustained high speed cruising as would be done on American interstate highways. The overdrive offered 7 forward gears including a relaxed top cruising gear. The short geared forty percent smaller engine Italian sports cars were simply not up to this type of travel. The design made the cars distinctly British and much different from the more expensive but very German Porsche and the more expensive and very American Corvette.
The car line developed from the TR2 in the late 40s through the TR6 in the mid 1970s. The car got new bodies, an independent rear suspension, roll up windows, and even a six cylinder engine. When the Triumph line of sedans was dropped in favor of a new line of Rovers in a consolidating industry, the TR6 was dropped.
The Triumph name was last used in the 80s on a rebadge of the Honda Civic. While the Civic has a good reputation as a small car, it was no Triumph. When the car was not accepted as a Triumph a luxury brand Rover badge was attached to it. Britain of the time apparently had more underutilized car names than distinct models. Those that thought that there was nothing intrinsically British about a car were no doubt shocked that the perfectly competent Honda was not celebrated and certainly not exported successfully. The Honda based line died in 2005 and the tooling exported to China. At least it died with a last export, the original point.
Well my drink is empty and while I check what a Morgan costs now. Come again tomorrow for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting. First published in 2018.