Ownership Experience

I'm a lifelong motor racing fan and for over 30 years a highlight of my year has been the annual "pilgrimage" to the 24 hours of Le Mans, usually camping at the circuit. 

My TVR ownership began with a Griffith 500 in the early 2000s. The excitement, soon after, of TVR competing in 2003-5 with the Speed Six engined Tuscan T400R will live with me forever and, no doubt, encouraged my upgrading to the new Tuscan 2S in 2005. In those days, with Peter Wheeler still at the helm, as a TVR owner and/ or club member you were "part of the family" with great access to company personnel, and the team had a marquee at the Houx campsite, where we could meet with them and discuss their plans. In 2003, TVR's entire racing budget was about the same as Audi's catering budget! That year, the cars failed to finish the race but the next year both cars finished in creditable positions. I remember discussing with TVR race engineers at a TVR Car Club event in Cardiff, about 2006, how they planned to extract more power through exhaust routing reconfiguration but, sadly, it wasn't to be. With the sale of the company to Nikolai Smolenski, racing was soon at an end, and the company didn't last much longer. 

My endurance racing loyalties drifted over the succeeding years until the debut of the Corvette C8R in 2020. The Corvette road car had always been the nearest thing to a TVR in terms of "bangs for your buck", but now here was an exciting new mid-engined that, to me, looked less like an American muscle car, and more like a European sports car, available, finally, in RHD but with the rarity/ uniqueness of a TVR.

My interest in F1 had also been waning and I now found the endurance racing format far more entertaining than the sprint procession. The mixture of prototypes and GT cars provides additional challenge, with GT cars becoming ever closer to the road cars on which they're based, and that many of us can aspire to own. The latest, GT3 class, even requires ABS, lowering motorsports entry barrier to less experienced drivers. It seems, also, we are entering a new "Golden Age" of endurance racing with more manufacturers flooding-in and new balance of performance regulations that provide for genuinely tight and exciting racing!