Adding to the TR "saga"

Sir,

I should like to add more to the TR “saga”. I started university in 1965 with a 1957 TR3, which I kept for three years. During the first year I spent a month motoring throughout the Continent, and found the TR an excellent touring car. Not only could I cruise along the autobahns at 80 m.p.h. for most of the day, but could also make short work of the alpine gradients. The car attracted great attention wherever we went, and when we stopped groups of the locals would gather around and gawk as if it were an object from outer-space. On one stop at an alpine village in Switzerland, an old lady of 70 or more asked if she could take it for a quick run up one of the nearby alps.

At the end of my three years’ ownership in which the “beast” had become battered and beer-stained, and suffering from a bad attack of the rust beetle, I let her go to an eager mechanical engineering undergrad for £100. I met the same fellow a year later and he congratulated me on the best buy he had made. He had driven the car unmercifully for a year and just sold it for (wait for it) £100.

I now own an Austin Healey 100/4 and I regret the change. Being so used to hammering and battering the TR, I find it doesn’t work with other cars. I hope that in the future I can again own the “ubiquitous” TR, and perhaps assemble my ideal of a TR4-engined aluminium-bodied TR3.

Swindon.
Stuart C. Hamilton.