The video below, provided by the V8olvo team, tells the whole story. Fortunately, nobody was hurt, and the Volvo will be ready to race later this morning. It seems unlikely that the TR7 can be fixed, but you never know what miracles of duct-tape repair might happen at a 24 Hours Of LeMons race!

We've got some still photos of the action as well, thanks to Jesse of the Killer Bee MGB team.

Well, he wasn't hurt in the wreck, that is; his teammates (including 5-time DOTS honoree WhatWouldJesseDo) might end up inflicting some bodily harm due to unhappiness over the self-inflicted PIT Maneuver that takes place in the video below. Here you will see the view from the Team Stimulus Package Honda Civic as the incident unfolds.

The images of this shiny red British Leyland product come to us courtesy of Vintage Racer, the man who sends us so many great car photos. Here's what VR has to say about this find:

So I'm over in West Seattle at a friend of mine's art gallery opening, and this car caught my eye. I've seen them on the tack, but I've never seen one on the street. And considering how wet it gets up here, the fact that's it, and its Lucas Electrics are still running - well, not on a par with the Resurrection, but still pretty miraculous....

Jeff comes from a family of wild-eyed racing fanatics, so he got started early. His first car was this '73 MGB, a project he started at the age of 13.

After hot-rodding it with the best of late-80s technology, he began his racing career via autocrossing.

It turned out that the young Jeff had quite a gift for driving. Little did he know that this gift would ultimately lead to years and years of life on the road as a pro racer, followed by a brilliant career as a sculptor.

Kept in the ol' racing scrapbook is this letter to the parents of the then-16-year-old MGB-drivin' hoon. Jeff claims that he really wasn't particularly wild as a street driver back then, and that the racket of his Supertrapp muffler made the "KILLR BE" seem to be going faster than it really was. When you're done reading the Concerned Parents letter, you might enjoy seeing some of the cars Jeff has owned over the years.

Folks,

This note is to let you know that your son is endangering others in this town by his reckless driving. At the very least, you should talk to him about it; before either he kills himself or maims some innocent bystander.

His "KILLR BE" license plate could be very appropriate for the way he drives. He has been seen skidding his car around corners, jack-rabbiting from traffic lights and, most dangerous, passing on the right (at about 60 mph) in a 35 mph zone where the road narrows from 2 lanes to 1.

His driving is down-right dangerous. It isn't cute.

This note is by no means to be vindictive. It is a plea to you to talk to him, threaten him if you need to, to protect the other drivers and pedestrians in our town. So far he has been lucky. If he keeps it up, his luck will run out. It will be on your heads and your hearts when he causes serious injury by this foolhardy behavior.

A concerned parent.

Given the large overlap between Jalopnik readers and Stag owners- a relationship we're probably better off leaving unexplored- it isn't surprising that we've heard from Zeusnemesis, the owner of this Triumph. Here's what he has to say about his car:

I was trying to post a few pictures in the thread of how Stags should properly appear: Replete with blonde, and top removed (car hardtop, that is, being a family-friendly site.)
Regardless, I know that editors surely hate being the "tech-guy" for every Jalopnik-yokel who wants to post a picture of his junk (uh, his car junk, that is) but I figured given the near-universal love of Stags, blondes, and V-8's on Jalopnik, perhaps I'd forward a few photos to you to include into the thread if you so choose.
It's got a '64 Buick 300 in it, T-350, and Corvette rear end. So, in essence, it's the "Rover swap," but with a few more cubic inches and a cast iron block with aluminum heads — just like the original OHC "Twin-Dolomite" boat anchor.
No 8 foot long single row Simplex timing chains or any other English-engineered tomfoolery (at least under the hood!). Otherwise, it's all English original Stag, through and through.

This all started when I got an email from the captain of the Dai Hard 24 Hours Of LeMons team, who will be bringing the first-ever LeMons Daihatsu Charade to Thunderhill in a couple of months. He'd just bought a '69 Morris Minor woody wagon and had it shipped over here, and he lives a few blocks from me. Did I want to come check it out?
It's not really supposed to be on the street quite yet, what with the utter lack of California-legal paperwork, but what the hell- we put it on the street for this photo session. He's already into the Kafkaesque ordeal of the California DMV Experience, but feels confident that it should be fully legit in the near future. The car is very solid, with hardly any rust (though some of the rotted woodwork will need replacing). And hey, check out the Lucas battery!

Thanks to Buick, they had the V8, and the British Leyland designers took a long enough break from throwing gasoline bombs on the picket lines to produce this outstanding triple-scoop setup. The center scoop feed the air cleaner, while the two outer scoops are somehow hooked into the car's ventilation system- hey, there's no way that setup could have any problems, right? We don't care, because we say these scoops look great, even compared to Detroit's best scoops from the Golden Age Of The Musclecar.

Naturally, we'll be continuing this series, so feel free to suggest your favorite hood scoops. How about the NACA vents on the Lamborghini Espada? The twin nostrils of the '68 Pontiac GTO? The Ford Thunderbolt? Or perhaps some of the new generation of retro'd-out Detroit scoops?
Image source: BritishV8

Cutting to the chase, the Sprite starts and runs now, so now I've just got to do some major minor to-do list items such as rebuilding the entire braking system, mounting those Miata seats I grabbed cheap, cooling and exhaust system assembly, and so on. Since the hardest part of any Hell Project (the registration paperwork) is taken care of, should be utter torture smooth sailing from this point forward! Continue with this sequential gallery thingy to hear my tale of Wiring Hell:

The reason I got the car so cheap in the first place- other than the fact that it's a beat-to-crap basket case with a ridiculously oversized engine installation- was that the original wiring was completely hosed. Hosed so badly, in fact, that even the brownout-inducing spirit of Joe Lucas, Prince Of Darkness felt uncomfortable hovering around the car. What little unburnt Lucas wiring was left in the car took a one-way trip straight to the garbage can… or into a decoy wiring harness in the thief-proof Toyota truck stereo project.

Best to start over from scratch, in this case. Fortunately, I've done a fair amount of car wiring over the years, not to mention building several instrument panels from scratch. Doing all the electricals in the Black Metal V8olvo made this project seem less daunting than it might have otherwise.

I've learned from extremely painful experience that it's a lot easier to wire a car if you sketch out some sort of diagram. It also makes it much easier when you have to repair or modify your wiring later on, because it's impossible to remember the super-redneck workarounds you rigged up after a few months go by.

The guy who engineered the engine swap also rigged up a nice powerful Delco internally-regulated three-wire alternator, so no maddening Toyota charging system mysteries to unravel here. Just put a charge light in the dash and it should work fine.

Using split loom and a bunch of leftover Painless Wiring harness wire from Black Metal V8olvo crew chief Hellhammer's shop, I wired up the car. Even in a no-frills machine like the Sprite, there's always more stuff to wire than one might expect. Gauges and idiot lights, turn signals, horn, et cetera- all of it requires wiring going through the firewall. Sadly, John Law mandates stuff like horns and headlights, and one look at the car tells me that I'll be having frequent conversations with members of the law enforcement community as soon as I take this thing on public roads. And they call this a free country!

99 million stripped wires later, I had the somewhat-modified factory instrument panel rigged up with all the stuff I needed

Also learned from painful car wiring experience was the reality that I will have to completely remove the instrument panel at some point. For this reason, all wires go through pairs of harness connectors, in this case scavenged from race-car parts Volvos. Tip: it's pretty easy to pop out the connector pins and concentrate all the ones hooked to heavy-gauge wires into the connectors you plan to use.

Tachometer, gas gauge, wiper switch, engine cooling fan switch, ignition switch, ignition lock, horn button, starter button, headlight switches (separate for low and high beams, because I couldn't find the right kind of switch in my stash), turn signal switch (I don't want to screw with crappy British Leyland steering column switches, so I put a 3-way switch on the dash), charge and oil pressure idiot lights, and turn signal indicator lights (a '63 Ford pickup hazard indicator light for left, Volvo 164 Fasten Seat Belt light for right).

Yeah, I love junkyard stuff and general beater-y wretchedness. The idea is to build this car on a 24 Hours Of LeMons budget, though I think it might be tough to find anyone willing to take this thing out on a race track with the likes of the Size Matters '67 Plymouth Fury. Here's a Pick-N-Pull battery mounted in the trunk, using the tried-and-true BMW E30 battery-cable hardware. I still haven't rigged any kind of battery tie-down or hydrogen venting system, but that's not so important in a car that has no brakes yet. Add it to the Hell Project to-do list!

The positive battery cable and the bundle of wires going back to the rear of the car (turn signals, taillights, brake lights, fuel pump, fuel gauge sender) come into the passenger compartment via these hardly-rusty-by-British-Leyland-standards channels. There's just barely room for the Miata seat to clear this stuff. In fact, there's just barely room for anything to clear anything else, given how tiny the Spridget is.

I picked up a 1970s Toyota truck speedometer to use- not wanting to deal with weird speedo cable adapters or fabrication, I figured it would be best to match the gauge to the Celica transmission I've got- but I decided not to use it in this dash. That's because it only goes to 85 MPH, which wouldn't be a big deal except for the 4.56:1 differential gear ratio and small-diameter tires; this speedo will be pegged before I'm even off surface streets! I'm going to pick up a later 120 MPH Celica unit and manually calibrate it (i.e., use the cop-grade speedometer in my Crown Victoria to clock it at various speeds, then print my own speedo faceplate label).

I figured that Italian gauges would add sportiness to my ride, and would you believe that this Alfa Romeo Spider Benzina gauge works perfectly with the Healey's fuel sender?

In fact, the only junkyard gauge that doesn't work right is the metric VDO temperature gauge I pulled from some sort of Audi. I have the right sender and it's wired correctly- I think- but it doesn't care. No problem, though, because rather than buy a new 2-1/16" gauge for, oh, $9.95, I've fabricated my own using a dead Volvo clock (obtained free from the V8olvo) with its innards replaced by a Celica temp gauge crudely busted out of a cluster unit at the junkyard and epoxied into place. It works fine using the Toyota gauge sender that came with the car, though I still need to rig up some kind of faceplate glass to protect the needle. You learn tricks like this trying to stay under that daunting $500 LeMons budget!

So now I can climb into the driver's seat (which isn't actually, like, bolted down or anything) and fire up that 20R, much to the delight of my long-suffering neighbors. The car came with a pretty decent exhaust system, but I removed it to get access to the fuel pump wiring and haven't gotten around to reinstalling it. Open headers rule! Note the illuminated switches, courtesy of the too-awesome-to-describe-here HSC Electronic Supply surplus store in ultra-geeky Milpitas.

One major problem is the points ignition system (Toyota didn't go to electronic ignitions in US-spec R engines until '78 or so). It works fine for now, but points suck. Period. Don't even try to defend points ignitions here, because even the most rabid fan of non-electronic ignitions has only one leg to stand on, debate-wise: protection against the EMP pulse of a nuclear explosion... and I figure I'll have bigger problems than an engine stall if a nuke goes off in my line of sight, anyway. Fortunately, I picked up a nice 20R electronic ignition system while I was junkyard shopping for Japanese fuse boxes.

A few bits of wiring remain; I have yet to hook up the headlights, horn, and engine cooling fan, since I've been bashing away at the front of the car in an attempt to get the extremely, uh, innovative cooling system that came with the car to function properly. This should be wrapped up pretty soon, and I should have the brakes together any year day now. Check in later for more 20R Sprite adventures!

If you prefer being a nitpicker to being merely observant, you might then point out that the British Leyland name existed only from 1968 to 1986, and thus several of these ads fall outside those boundaries as well. But here at Jalopnik, we defy categorization of obscure European machinery!

When you're done here, you might check out our favorite VW ads, then go right on with the Datsun, Toyota, Mustang, Renault, General Motors, and Chevrolet ads.

1972 Triumph TR6 (USA)	1981 Austin Rover (UK)	1966 Austin Mini (Australia)
1975 Triumph Spitfire (USA)	1970 Hillman Hunter (Australia)	1975 Triumph, MG (USA)
1980 Austin Metro (UK)	1977 Leyland Princess (Germany)	1976 Triumph TR7 (USA)
1973 Triumph (UK)	1976 Leyland Princess (UK)	1974 Triumph Spitfire (USA)
1981 Triumph Acclaim (UK)	2003 MG ZR (Spain)	1977 British Leyland (UK)	1970 Simca 1000 (Spain)

The one that caught my eye first was the very clean, automatic-equipped 1976 BMW 2002. The odometer reads just over 4,000 miles, which means it's either a very well-maintained 104,000-mile car or a 4,000-mile car that spent several decades moldering in a driveway somewhere. When I mentioned this car to 24 Hours Of LeMons Assistant Perpetrator Nick Pon, he had to rush right over to the yard to pull some pieces for his '76 2002.

Right next to the 2002 sits a fairly complete 1970 Triumph Spitfire. The engine and front suspension look pretty nice; a Spitfire Hell Project owner could definitely feast on this junkyard find!

That's not enough? Hey, there's something for you lovers of vintage Japanese machinery as well: a California-built 1988 Toyota Corolla GT-S. It's an automatic car, and the underhood sticker identifies the engine as a 4A-LC… but that sure looks like a 16-valve 4A to me.

Now let's see what the Server Hamsters do when I present them with these photos in our new gallery style. Fasten your seatbelts!

This is just the second (presumably) running Stag I've ever seen in my life, and it has taken up residence not far from my house. Stags were sold in the United States for the 1971, 1972, and 1973 model years, so I'm going to say this one comes from the middle of that range. Even by British Leyland standards, the Stag was nightmarishly unreliable, mostly due to its not-quite-ready-for-real-world-use Triumph V8. According to the Wikipedia page, the Stag suffered from:

• long simplex roller link chains combined with inadequate engine maintenance and factory specified 7,500-mile (12,070 km) oil change intervals. The chains could last less than 25,000 miles (40,200 km) resulting in expensive damage when they failed;
• inadequately sized main bearings in the early OHC 2.5 litre V8 design with short lives, changed in the 3.0 litre design;
• aluminium head warpage due to poor castings, head gaskets which restricted coolant, leading to overheating;
• water pump failures relating to poor drive gear hardening, prematurely wearing out the gear and stopping the water pump.
• In some cases, overheating was caused by clogged waterways in the cylinder block, found to be filled with casting sand left over from manufacture.

But this one has risen above all those handicaps and survives down on the Alameda street. It lives just around the corner from the 1948 International Harvester KB-2 pickup, as we can see in this photo.

This is our third MGB, after this '71 MGB-GT and this '73 MGB (some might say that this super-rare '69 MGC-GT counts as an MGB as well).

The "black bumper" MGs don't get much affection from the purists, partly because of the ugly 5 MPH crash bumpers, partly because of the DOT-mandated tall ride height, partly because of the increasingly horrible British Leyland build quality, but mostly because of the 62.5-horsepower engine. Yes, this car was so miserably underpowered that MG actually claimed a half-horsepower in the rating. However, since this one is a '75, it's exempt from California's emission laws. That means its owner is free to add go-fast goodies to his or her heart's content.

Was the '78 the best Mini built during the first couple of decades of production? Raymond Baxter claims that's the case in this British Leyland dealer-training video, with the "fashionable matte black grille" and backup lights as standard equipment, to name just two improvements. Of course, others had ripped off the Mini's innovative front-drive/transverse-engine design by then, but Baxter shows that the Fiesta and Renault 5 just couldn't compete.

As Davey Johnson has made very clear, there's something special about brown cars, and as for a brown British Leyland product... well, it's very much of its time. For reasons we have a hard time understanding, May's woman
lacked enthusiasm for the gift, so now the Triumph is part of his own fleet.
That brings up the question: What Detroit vehicle is the counterpart to the brown Triumph 2000 MkII? The vehicle the well-intentioned American or Canadian car geek would buy his or her S.O. in order to share not-quite-ironic-enough appreciation for such things? Perhaps a two-tone 1975 Mercury Cougar XR7?
Telegraph.co.uk

So, new day, new Nice Price or Crack Pipe. And how could you go wrong with a steak and kidney pie mixture of British socialist labor union build quality, and 1970s American safety and emissions standards? That's right — it's a 1980 Triumph TR7 30th Anniversary Edition for an asking price of $6,495. Not only that but this seller loves the exclamation points!

This car has it all — poorly aligned bumpers, corduroy seats, tiny radio speakers, and inscrutable heater controls. Or is that the choke? No, it's the wipers — wait, why does it have that swirl symbol on the knob? Argh!

It does warm our hearts to see MG Mitten sisal mats in the foot-wells, lets hope they're not hiding rust holes in the floorboards the size of the English Channel.

Now, in case you are not familiar, the TR7 replaced the hair-shirt of a car TR6, and was British Leyland's attempt at a modern sports automobile that would meet all the crazy safety and emissions standards the colonists could throw at it. That meant that on its 1975 debut, it was only available as a hard top, as the general expectation was that the U.S. government was about to ban convertibles and fun. Well I don't know about fun, but topless cars didn't get legislated into extinction, and so in 1979 a fabric roof version was offered, making the car about 10 times more appealing, but sadly not overcoming its other shortcomings of insufficient power, lackluster handling, and poor build quality. The 1998cc engine pumped out a meager 105hp (92 in anti-fun American guise) and it's replacement in 1981 by the Rover-powered TR8 was too little too late. Triumph withdrew from the US market the next year, and eventually went the way of Elvis.

I mentioned that the seller likes exclamation points. It seems they got a deal on them somewhere, as every sentence ends in one. Or maybe they're just so damn excited to get rid of this car! They also claim that they have an appraisal! From 2001! It says the car is great! Isn't that awesome?! So maybe it's not as bad as you might think?! And it's got some shiny-ass paint! It also sports the 5-speed transmission so highway driving is possible without engine-drone induced insanity resulting!

The only sentence that is denied the emphatic punctuation treatment is the one alerting you that the gas gauge works "sparatically". I guess it was also denied spell check. But hey, what the hell- it's English and old, and much like Prince Charles, it's expected to have a few warts and be a little wonky- that's the charm.

So with Summer on its way, and the siren call of top-down motoring luring you to Craigslist, what do you think of this $6,495 TR7? Will the sun never set on its Nice Price empire? Or is the seller living in a Crack Pipe world of warm beer and questionable dental hygiene?

You decide!

Omaha Craigslist or go here if the ad disappears.

Thanks to snidelywhiplash for the tip.

This aluminum V8 started life as a Buick in 1961, was shared with Pontiac and Oldsmobile (where it benefited from Turbo Rocket Fluid), then crossed the Atlantic and was installed in the MGB-GT V8, the Triumph TR8, and countless Land Rovers. Along the way, it powered Mickey Thompson's Dan Gurney-driven 1962 Indianapolis 500 car and (in Repco-modified SOHC form) drove Brabhams to Formula One victory in 1966 and 1967. GM discontinued the aluminum engine after the 1963 model year (due to various production headaches surrounding the aluminum casting process, hassles with aluminum-corroding antifreezes, and the suspicions of patriotic Americans who felt that a V8 with just 215 cubes must be some sort of subversive Red plot), but Rover kept it going all the way until 2006. The British V8 article on this engine is quite entertaining; it's a reprint of a 1976 Autocar article, with editorial responses to the virulent Anti-American sentiments of the original writer.
[British V8, Wikipedia]

And that Escort is just one of many great British race cars that VR photographed at last summer's B.C. Historics. Lotus, Sunbeam, Austin-Healey, and MG are all represented, and we get a couple of race Volvos as an added bonus! I've been falling behind on my duty to share VR's great racing photographs, so expect more of this sort of thing in the near future.

Clearly, PNP is taking a cue from the classic National Lampoon cover here, and what vehicle could be cuter than a chrome-bumper MGB-GT? It's like a friendly little puppy, begging you to save it from death! A friendly puppy that spends most of its time at the vet and leaks all over the house, that is, but just look at it!



Whoever is writing Pick-N-Pull's Craigslist ads has a good sense of humor. We see the two possible outcomes to the "you don't buy the car" scenario. One shows the parking spot- complete with oil stain- in which the MG once sat prior to its new owner hauling it away; the other shows The Crusher working up a good appetite with a Volvo wagon entree, with the heavy implication being that the MG will be dessert. Lines like "Buy this car and you will know what you will be doing for many months to come" and "Legendary Lucas Reliability" imply that the writer has at least a passing acquaintance with British Leyland products. Here's a giant screen shot of the original ad, just in case someone snaps up that super-bargain and the ad gets pulled. Thanks to Casadelshawn for the tip!



[Craigslist San Francisco]

There was much grumbling in the pits about the "really nice XJ-S," with talk about the impossibility of getting "such a nice car" for under $500. Nonsense! Anyone who reads Project Car Hell knows that you can get running, good-looking V12 Jaguars for next to nothing… and this one was actually a crude Tijuana bad-welds-and-bondo salvage job under the skin. For a big luxury machine- with all accessories still intact, including the stereo and ashtray- this car was pretty quick on the track, with a best lap of 1:42.746, and its 27th-place finish was very, very impressive. They stirred up some controversy over on Autofiends, thanks to the much-disputed cleanliness of a pass of the V.I.P. BMW, which really adds to the post-race fun.


This car was actually leading the race at the end of Day One, but some reading of the fine print was in order: Supreme LeMons Court Justice Lieberman heard the engine in this car during the BS Inspection- and it sounded terrible, even by very lenient Malaise British standards- and bestowed a whopping 50-lap bonus on the team. Ha ha, funny joke… right? Then, of course, the clattery, Lucas-haunted Triumph just refused to die, going around and around and around the track. Its best lap time of 1:54.673 was- for lack of a better word- gastropodal, but when the race was over, Team Cape Coventry was the triumphant- get it?- owner of the invented-just-for-the-occasion Alfetta Versus TR7 Challenge trophy. 21st place, or 56th place if you don't believe in bonus laps.


The Buick V6-powered Wedginator, which did most of its laps at the SF '08 race behind a tow truck (thanks to fuel-system woes), performed much better this time around, with an 82nd place finish. Its best lap time of 1:40.567 was about a week faster than its Triumph-powered rival- and up there with the E30s and RX7s- but too many thrilling driving adventures led Chief Perp Lamm to put it on the trailer on Sunday. Don't worry, Wedginators, there's always Reno!


This Chevy-powered XJ-6 is a much-battered vet of many previous LeMons events, but it didn't seem to be running quite right this time, with a second-only-to-the-Bipolar-Express best lap of 2:06.140.

[British V8]