[SOLD] TVR Griffith 400

The very name TVR Griffith conjures up visions of an ill-bred “pit bull terrier” of a car with a reputation for evil handling, overheating and a gross lack of development. Having owned three and raced one (O.K. that one was a Tuscan) I can state with some authority that these sentiments are entirely justified! Here are a few thumb nails to set the scene….. “Changing the Grantura into a Griffith transformed it from a passive little car which did nothing wrong into a manic little car that did nothing right” A wonderful quote in a recent issue of “Sprint” attributed to that well known American motoring journalist David E. Davies Jnr that I had not heard before. “I feel safer on my Kawasaki on the Daytona banking at racing speed than I do in my Griffith stationary in the garage”. Another notable quote by a well known, successful (and therefore fearless) motor bike racer. John Bolster, the maddest of all road testers (…none is exactly sane in my experience) took one to Europe for maximum speed runs, but the bonnet blew up at speed. A strong rope soon solved that little set back and his article appeared in the “Autosport” issue of 1st October 1965 and he recorded 0-100 in 14.4 seconds with a top speed of 163 mph, complete with rope, using BFR 400B. I met him when I was working at Lotus. He was sampling the Turbo Esprit and I can vouch for his unusual approach to car testing. He was a Grand Prix driver at one time. Another road test was by “Motor” of Martin Lilley’s Tuscan ML500 in 1967. They listed 0-60 mph in 5.5 seconds, 0-100 in 13.8 (the fastest they had recorded at the time) and a top speed of 155 mph. Generally “Motor” and “The Autocar” could be relied on to tell the truth. This car is now also a resident of Norfolk. I saw my first Griffith at an autocross meeting at Dane Villa Farm near Knutsford about 1966. A certain John Akers was very successful with a Grantura, and he also had a bare TVR chassis with which he competed in the specials class, and regularly took FTD with one or the other, against Minis, Anglias, Midgets and the like. I was spectating at one such event (I had a Mk.3 Grantura at the time) when up rumbled a pale blue Griffith 400. With hindsight I suspect the driver was Martin Lilley who had come to encourage Akers. I still have the photograph I took and the registration no. was DFV 567C. I was overcome with the automotive equivalent of lust (rust?) which had to remain unrequited for many years. Roger Connell raced his in HSCC events in the eighties and had rear wheels fall off so regularly that he lost count of how many times it occurred. He also lost count of how many times he won outright, but never on the same day! He was my inspiration when I decided to race a LWB Tuscan in HSCC events. Some years ago I owned a right hand drive Martin Lilley-made Griffith, OUU 4F, which had an interesting early history of multiple write-offs by the Bond film stuntman, Colin Skeaping. Is there an underlying message here? So you can see that a lot of emotion and controversy surrounds these cars, which, if nothing else, makes them interesting. Cars can be memorable through being either very good or very bad, but never indifferent, and I’ll leave it to you to decide in which category the Griffith should be. I know but dare not say as I would be drummed out of the club for heretical views. Instead, here is a potted history of Griffiths in general and JKE 35D in particular. Griffiths were made mainly for the United States market and were the result of an unnatural relationship between a Grantura and a Cobra. The name comes from that of the importer, New York based Jack Griffith, a Ford dealer and motoring entrepreneur. The cars were made, like all other TVRs, in Blackpool, but were usually shipped without engines or gearboxes, as these were sourced from Ford of America and fitted in Griffith’s small factory. They carried Griffith badges and Griffith chassis plates and no mention was made of TVR at all, a fact that the chaps in Blackpool may have been quite relieved by. My car has incorrect badges by-the-way, before you start saying I’m wrong. The first 1963 cars were virtually standard Mk III Granturas with the rounded tail and small rear window. There was some strengthening of the chassis, and mounting points were altered, but not really much more was done, and the cars still used the BMC final drive. Bonnets had to be reshaped to clear the air cleaners and wheels had more spokes but there were no other distinguishing features. Unfortunately the cars rapidly gained a deserved reputation for overheating and unreliability. Griffith was a good salesman and the Blackpool factory was soon being asked to produce too many cars, too soon, so quality suffered. Americans, then, as now, generally lacked mechanical sympathy and expected things to work first time. In contrast British owners (not that there were many…) were more than happy to fix things at weekends, believing, rather naively, that it all added to the experience. Later, the car was restyled like the example here with the Kamm tail and large rear window. The records are not clear, but the majority of Griffiths were the early version and it is thought that only 59 of the revised ones were made out of a total of 249. When the exterior restyling was done, the interior was also revamped and all the instruments were located in front of the driver, in a layout very much like the ill-fated TVR Trident but I think I’m right in saying that only LHD cars benefited from this and the few RHD ones retained the MK. III, 1800S style dashboard, which I prefer. Cooling was also improved, the engine’s that is, not the occupants’, who continued to suffer. Engines were from the Ford small block family and were the 289 cubic inch (4.7 litres) version but in two stages of tune. The basic version was rated at 195 BHP and had a single twin choke carburettor (2V in Ford parlance), whilst the performance option gave 271 BHP thanks to an increased compression ratio, revised valve timing, and a four barrel carburettor (4V meaning 4 venturis and not 4 valves per cylinder). Other features were improved to enhance durability. Gearboxes were either the Ford “top loader” (all this means is that the gears were fitted through a removable top cover) or the optional Borg Warner T-10 box with closer ratios. Final drives were Salisbury Power-Lock limited slip units with a variety of ratios available, chiefly 3.07, 3.54 and 3.77:1. The BMC unit was abandoned some way through production as being too weak. The first brochures merrily and optimistically mentioned 0-60 in 4 seconds for both engine variants. The final Tuscan V-8 brochure’s figures were 0-60 in 5 seconds and 130 mph for the 195 BHP engine and 160 mph for the 271 BHP HiPo. It’s unlikely that both these claims could be right as a difference of 30 mph would require more like a 90 BHP increase, by my rough calculations. Production started in 1963 and finished in 1965 with the final nail in the coffin being the American dock strike from December 1964 to April 1965. This particular car, chassis no 400-6-045, left England in 1965 but was not finished by the Griffith factory until 1966. It was sold new by Tasca Ford of Rhode Island who specialised in engine improvements and fitted an Edelbrock inlet manifold, a Cobra cast aluminium sump, and cross over exhaust manifolds. To explain this, most production V-8 engines have cruciform cranks for reasons of refinement and the firing order dictates that for optimum scavenging 2 exhaust pipes from one side must link with 2 from the other. Remember GT40s with pipes snaking across the engine? Racing V-8s have flat cranks, vibrate badly but don’t need such difficult manifolding, behaving like two 4 cylinder engines. Fitting a cross over manifold to a Griffith reduces already inadequate ground clearance to impossible. I don’t know what cam is fitted to this engine but the car goes quite well and is faster than my 5 litre Tuscan that I raced in HSCC events in the late eighties! It should be born in mind that American manufactures claimed much higher power levels than would be the case in Europe, much like present day tuners do, but for different reasons. The American SAE rating allowed the highest possible compression ratio, minimal loss exhausts, no generator, an externally driven water pump, and the ignition and mixture could be set manually at each speed/load condition to optimum. Also the correction factors for ambient pressure, temperature and humidity gave the impression of more power than the more realistic DIN datum. My old 302 engined Tuscan gave a genuine 220 BHP at the wheels on Bill Blydenstein’s rolling road in HSCC Road Sports trim, with a paper specification akin to the 289 HiPo, so the magnitude of the discrepancy can be seen. I used to be a performance engineer with Fords and know only too well the false claims made by tuners. They do it, of course, because the customer is far more likely to cheerfully write a large cheque if he thinks he’s been given great dollops of power. It’s one of the great motoring misconceptions of the day. I’ve traced most of the American owners, coming across Morgan Warren, Paul Lipps, George Destefano, Mike Shore and Steve Serio mainly in the State of Massachusetts. In 1996 the car returned to oodwood Green Racing in England only to be sold immediately to Manfred Minder in Germany. It then came back home via the dealer, Hunter Classics in 1997, and I am now the third UK owner, acquiring the car in 2005 from Martin Sanders who had hardly used it. Ian Bannister helped me find it. I have done a lot of mechanical tidying, fitted an alternator, some silencers (a poor description actually…) as it came with open exhausts the noise from which made women faint and rain fall from blue skies, fitted a period brake servo, improved the interior trim and modified the Hurst shifter to make reverse harder to obtain in mistake for first. 0-60 in about 5 second forwards is one thing, but in reverse can be quite a shock to the system. It’s quite rare to find one of these in original road-going trim as many have been converted to racers and this process can hardly ever be reversed, and many have rather inappropriate out-of-period modifications. Mechanical Specification Engine: Refer to text for most details. Edelbrock 4 barrel 600 cfm carburettor. Gear box: Ford close ratio “top loader” from a Fairlane Ratios of 2.32, 1.69, 1.29 and 1.0:1 Final drive: Salisbury Power-lock limited slip Reduction ratio of 3.54:1 Wheels: KN (fake Minilites), knock-on, 6J x 15 Tyres: Pirelli P5, 205/70 VR 15 Performance: 141 mph maximum; in gears:- 1st 61, 2nd 83, 3rd 105 mph at 6500 RPM All values calculated but will be accurate as we know the engine has sufficient power to attain 6500 RPM in top.

Tags:Edelbrock, Ford, Griffith, Norfolk, TVR, United Kingdom, V8