GROUP TEST
Celebrating the wheels that gave us wings and the dads that helped us on our way to the open road…
1972 TRIUMPH 2000 MKII
The first car; we all have one and your dad probably lent a helping hand in obtaining it. So, as we celebrate Father’s Day here in Practical Classics, it’s the perfect opportunity to look back and remember the cars that gave us our freedom. From the excitement/terror of that first drive on the public highway to the moment we threw the L-plates away, we recall those times we fixed them on the driveway and the epic adventures to far flung places. These early experiences shaped our driving lives and for many of us, dad was on hand to help.
I spent much of my childhood at classic car events, sometimes with my whole family, but most often it was just me and my dad in his Triumph TR6. He was a local group leader in the TR Register from 1990-1997, so naturally most of the events we took in where affiliated to that particular club. This would take us all over the country, creating many fond memories in the process. Over the years, I also took my first tentative steps in vehicle maintenance, often helping dad with general servicing jobs on the TR – a particular favourite being sitting in the car and pumping the brake pedal on demand, while dad bled the brakes via the bleed nipple on the calipers.
In later years, we ventured further afield and made numerous visits to the famous Le Mans 24 Hours endurance race in France, often in highspeed convoys with other TR Register members, with the whole experience leaving a deep impression on me as a child. All I wanted to do was pass my driving test and get a TR of my own. Of course, it wasn’t quite that simple… by the time I was 18 and in possession of a freshly-minted driving licence, the economics of buying, insuring and running any car, let alone a Seventies British sports car, were going to be somewhat tricky. And unlike most of my friends, I wasn’t prepared to spend thousands of pounds insuring a ten-year-old Fiesta or Micra that was in itself only worth £500 or so. So, I hung fire for a few years instead and eventually went to university in Leicester, which was thankfully only a simple, two-hour, train ride from home in Bradford, so I didn’t really need a car anyway.
But the thought never went away and, eventually, another Triumph that I stumbled across while thumbing through the classified pages in this very magazine set the ball rolling in a slightly different direction. It was a
