Description
Author: Ralph Dodds
ISBN: 9781847979971
PUBLISHED: 19/10/2015
PAGES: 208
BINDING: Hardback
SIZE: 260x215 mm
INSIDE: 300 colour photographs
Fur nearly sixty years. NR produced some of he most thrilling and spine-tingling hand-built sports cars to emerge from any British motor manufacturer. Yet it was between 1981 and 2004, under the management of Peter Wheeler when the company finally shook off its shed-built roots and proved that it could produce cars that could match anything from Maranello or Stuttgart in terms of performance, but at a fraction of their price.
TVR was struggling when Wheeler took it over Sales of the new Tasmin were down and the banks were closing in. Tasmin-driving Wheeler knew that TVR could be turned around, and that he had the drive and motivation to lead that transformation. His vision was bold and his first move decisive: by fitting the Rover V8 engine to the wedge-shaped Tasmin he gave sales the jump-start that was needed. The Rover V8 would remain at the heart of the TVR range, in various guises, until the start of the twenty-first century.
Wheeler also introduced the retro-styled S Series, taking its styling cues from the popular 1970s M, and followed this with the Tuscan racer. The one-make race series for the Tuscan quickly established itself as the quickest and most exciting in the United Kingdom. From the Tuscan came the Griffith, a design icon that even today nearly twenty-five years after its launch, still looks futuristic. This paved the way for the cars that followed, Chimaera, Cerbera, road-going Tuscan and the brutal Sagaris, nicknamed 'axe-murderer' due to the slashes on its side. The range was crowned by the awesome 7.7-litre, 800bhp+ Speed Twelve, Furthemore, With the Speed Twelve, Wheeler did something that no other small-volume manufacturer dared to do and developed his own engine, not just once but twice with the Speed Six and AUP8, not to mention the engine for the limited-run Speed Twelve.
For twenty-three years. TVR was Peter Wheeler and Peter Wheeler was TVR. This is the richly illustrated story of those cars, the people who built them and the customers who drove them, chronicled by an enthusiast who has been passionate about TVR for over thirty years.
The word 'TVR" and the TVR speedline logo are registered trademarks of TVR Automotive Limited and are used with permission.
Illustrated with over 300 photographs, TVR - Cars of the Peter Wheeler Era tells the story of the design, development and engineering of some of some of TVR's fastest, outrageous and most successful cars, from the retro-styled S1, to the racing Tuscan, 1000bhp Speed Twelve and the brutal Sagaris.
