LETTERS OF THE WEEK
A top TVR buy
Congratulations to Jesse Billington for choosing the TVR Griffith V8 as his pick in your Value For Money Classics article (CCW, 10 January). I bought one of these amazing cars in the early 1970s, with the idea of competing in hill climbs and sprints.
The Ford 289 engine had hydraulic tappets, which weren’t ideal for high revs. I had been wondering what to do about this when, while driving into Yeovil, I stopped to look at a dragster parked on a garage forecourt, having never seen one before. I was soon joined by a very nice chap who showed me all around it, then invited me into his firm’s workshop. It was none other than the late Dennis Priddle – ‘Mr Six’. By this time he was using the bigger Chrysler Hemi-Head engines, so the old 289 engines were redundant – but he still had a few of them! He offered to build me a competition engine and a deal was done.
A subsequent visit to Janspeed in Salisbury resulted in a new exhaust system complete with manifolds. I had a lot of fun competing with that car and as I drove it to and from events soon got settled back in by the time I arrived. In its day it was quite a quick road car and a joy to drive. Perhaps the most memorable trip was leaving a sprint at Goodwood and returning to Dorchester in the company of an AC Cobra. I should never have sold it.
Danbury? I don’t think so…
In your write-up for The Way We Were on Burford in 1972 (CCW, 25 January), Richard Gunn thought the Volkswagen campe
