Ladies and gentlemen, brace yourselves and fasten your harnesses, preferably a five-point racing job, because TVR is staging yet another comeback. Yes, TVR, the wonderfully bonkers British brand that has died and been resurrected more times than a soap-opera villain, is back to have another go at building cars that make grown men giggle, scream, and occasionally soil themselves in fear.
To appreciate this moment, one must remember TVR’s heroic timeline: founded, folded, revived, collapsed, restarted, reimagined, re-collapsed, and now, almost impossibly somehow, alive again. If car companies had nine lives, TVR has gone through about fourteen. And that’s before brunch.
At one point in its long and occasionally terrifying history, the company even resorted to rebuilding Ford Mustangs. Yes, really. There were workshops full of people in Blackpool staring at American muscle and thinking, “Let’s make this British.” This was a time when TVR didn’t have two shillings to rub together, but by God they had enthusiasm and spanners. So, the irony is absolutely delicious that the new TVR will, once again, rely on a big, burly American heart: a Ford V8. Because when you’ve suffered a history of underfunded, overstressed, occasionally-exploding engines, why not borrow something from the land where horsepower is a religion and fuel economy is a comedy sketch?
But of course, no discussion of TVR is complete without mentioning the brand’s most famous trait: attempting to murder its owners. These cars were not “driver’s cars” in the traditional sense. They were widow-makers, beautiful, seductive assassins that would happily pirouette off a damp roundabout with all the elegance of a drunken ballerina armed with a chainsaw. A friend of mine, who owned the Chimera TVR, once said that a TVR could oversteer in a straight line, and frankly, he wasn’t joking. Stability control? Traction control? ABS? TVR thought those were for the weak, the timid, the people who didn’t want to meet God on a B-road.
And yet, us petrol-heads loved them.
Because TVR represented something gloriously unhinged: the belief that cars should be noisy, temperamental, slightly dangerous, and absolutely thrilling. They were the automotive equivalent of a pub brawl, chaotic, risky, but deeply satisfying if you walked away intact.
So now the brand rises once more, promising modern engineering, actual reliability (allegedly), and the brute force of a Ford V8. Will the new TVR succeed? Will it finally become a stable, financially sensible carmaker?
Of course not.
But if they build something loud, fast, and just a little bit suicidal, then God bless them, that’s the TVR we’ve been waiting for.
