End of an Era as TVR Factory Is Flattened

TVR

It’s been 20 years since TVR stopped building British beefcake sports cars at its Blackpool plant, and now, finally, the factory has been demolished to make way for new commercial premises.

Founded by TreVoR Wilkinson in 1947 who built his first lightweight machine based around the humble Morris 8, the company reached its peak in the 1990s, under the ownership of eccentric Peter Wheeler.

With Wheeler at the wheel TVRs were designed from the ground up with powerful inline six and V-8 engines and gorgeous glass-fiber bodywork. Innovation and ambition were a constant, with Wheeler conceiving a wild amphibious vehicle called the Scamander, the Speed 12 hypercar and even taking on the Le Mans 24 Hours.

Unfortunately, what TVR could never quite master was construction quality. Reliability was a constant worry for owners, usually electrical. Even the specially-built press cars couldn’t be trusted. On one test back in my Top Gear days, a colleague was locked inside a TVR for several hours when its complex electronic door latches gave up. On another the car just didn’t run at all and we had to push it around to get our pictures.

When they did work TVRs were fearsome machines, living up to their mythological monster names such as Chimera and Cerbera. Wheeler didn’t believe in driver aids such as ABS or traction control, with a very long travel accelerator being his answer to taming the mighty powertrains.

The cars could be brutal on the road, especially in the wet, but TVR’s one-make Tuscan race series was a great development platform for suspension and brakes. Get to understand and respect a TVR and it could be a supercar killer.

TVR Griffith
TVR

Wheeler sold TVR to Russian Nikolai Smolenski in 2004 who promised much and delivered nothing in nine years of ownership. A British consortium then took over and even showed a new Griffith sports car, to be built Wales, but once again TVR’s revival hasn’t been realised.

At least it won’t be completely forgotten, with planning documents for the Blackpool site stating, “Between buildings six and seven will sit a TVR car statue on a plinth to commemorate the long-standing use of the site as the TVR factory.”

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Comments

    I was wondering the status of the vaporware “new” TVR that was talked about years ago. Not a surprise an unused factory got demolished.

    They’ve been redeveloping it for a while now. I gather the last of the tenants have moved out so the changes continue.

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