1981 Triumph TR8 Convertible

I had already decided to purchase a Triumph TR8 by the time the inaugural 1980 models were first made available for sale to the general public in the Fall of calendar year 1979. However, I did opt to heed the counsel of Rod Fleener, long time parts manager at Monte Shelton BMC and a personal friend of our family, and stayed my hand in anticipation of buying a 1981 edition which was slated to have yet more horsepower courtesy of it being fitted with a computer controlled Bosch L-jetronic fuel injection system instead of the stodgy Zenith Stromberg carburetors used on the 1980 editions. This proved to be a truly fortuitous delay on my part, because by the end of 1980 I was in the process of going through divorce proceedings that saw me divesting myself of all manner of "toys" in order to cash my soon to be ex-wife out of both our house and other investments. It was not until 1987 when I happened to run across a classified advertisement in the Seattle Times offering for sale a genuine 1981 Triumph TR8 having exceedingly low mileage that I finally managed to acquire one of these rare vehicles.

For benefit of the uninitiated, the short lived TR8 was the swansong sports car from the much heralded (...pun definitely intended) Triumph Motor Company. It was manufactured in very limited numbers first as a pre-production coupe with automatic transmission from 1978 to 1980 and ultimately in convertible form having a five speed manual gearbox from late 1979 through October of 1981 when production ceased altogether. At the risk of gross oversimplification, the TR8 is basically a limited edition, factory engineered, eight cylinder, high performance version of the tepid TR7 - one which was powered by a throaty 3.5 liter aluminum alloy V8 engine derived from the early 1960’s Buick 215 cid V8 power plant. Production numbers for the TR8 constitute an aggregate of roughly 2750 cars of all variation distributed world wide with only 352 of those being genuine 1981 models - all of which were fuel injected convertibles such as the one seen here (...and credible estimates which I have read speculate that perhaps as few as only 100 or less of those true 1981 examples still exist in roadworthy condition some thirty years later).

For those of you who might be wondering, the cryptic meaning of my license plate takes the form of a rebus puzzle - an arrangement or juxtaposition of words and/or letters which collectively suggest a dissimilar series of words, or more often than not, a colloquial phrase. In this instance, a proper translation would be "FUN TO USE" (...i.e. the word "FUN" followed by not one but two, a homonym of "TO", occurrences of the letter "U", the plural form of which when enunciated is an English language homophone for the common verb "USE").