Four things you need to know about the plucky TVR Griffith 400
It's a recipe that has worked for decades: take a small sports car and shove in a large engine. The Cobra made the formula its own, but there have been plenty of other cars that have offered similar over-engined thrills, including the thundering, 75MM race-winning TVR Griffith 400. Here are four things you need to know about the Griff...
It owes its existence to the Ford Mustang
The man who first shoehorned a Ford V8 engine into the small Blackpool sports car was American Andrew Jackson 'Jack' Griffith. He'd been happily building high-performance versions of the Ford Falcon, but all that come to an end when Ford released the Mustang, which did more or less the same job has his hotted-up Falcons. He looked around for another car to fit the 289cu in Ford V8 engine into and chose the TVR Grantura. The Griffith 200 was born. Jack Griffith sadly passed away in December of last year.
At first, it wasn't called TVR
The Griffith Car Corporation was formed to market the Griffith. It was only later that TVR made its own factory version of the car, adopting the Griffith tag as a model name. By then, the American organisation had launched its uprated Griffith 400 model.
It inspired the Wheeler era TVRs
The first model launched when TVR was under the ownership of Peter Wheeler adopted the Griffith name. Its mix of curvy styling and raw V8 power set the template for a decade's worth of TVR models, the first sea change coming when TVR developed its own straight-six engine to use in place of the Rover V8 engines of its immediate predecessors. Today, both 1960s and 1990s Griffith generations are held in high regard. Will the Griffith's DNA be evident in the new TVR models, set for imminent release? With the new car using a derivative of the new Mustang V8, and rumoured to wear the Griffith badge, we have high hopes...
It took a spectacular win at 75MM
In the hands of Mike Jordan and Mark Whitaker, the TVR Griffith took a dramatic victory in the 75th Members' Meeting's Graham Hill Trophy. It got into a terrific three-way scrap with the Cobras of Michael Gans/Andrew Wolfe and Shaun Lynn/Emanuele Pirro. Jordan pulled out the overtaking move of the weekend to go around the outside of Wolfe, the latter then kept at bay by a slow puncture.
Photography by Drew Gibson, Jayson Fong and Nick Dungan
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Graham Hill Trophy
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