THE FORD Capri enthusiast gave the strangely styled creation a slightly quizzical look. "Why would you want to buy one those fibreglass bubbles?"
I was over in Blackpool last weekend covering a Ford Capri gathering for Life On Cars, and one owner I was chatting to seemed genuinely bemused when the one car that town can call its own suddenly thundered onto the seafront. The fibreglass bubble in question was a TVR and I struggled not to defend its honour. I challenge anyone with even the vaguest interest in cars not to love Blackpool's very own sports car.
The thing with TVR is that their products aren't really created in any conventional car industry sense, so I doubt any visiting bigwigs from BMW or Lexus would have been very impressed with the ramshackle sheds it called its factory. Certainly, I can think of no other car which was partly styled by the MD's dog, which after getting a bit peckish, bit a chunk out of the clay styling model for the Chimaera. This being TVR, the MD was pleased by his pooch's efforts and included the bite marks on the production model. That's part of the reason why TVRs are packed full of meaty goodness.
TVR was a slightly bonkers company, which as a treat for my 13th birthday I actually got given the chance to witness first hand on a tour of the Blackpool factory. The Griffith, Chimaera and Cerbera, I discovered, were crafted by hand out of plastic by chaps who'd then equip them with enormously powerful V8 engines, but no traction control, ABS, airbags or door handles. Nor did they think a car should be painted just one colour - as the iridescent and slightly mad TVR Tuscan proved - or have interiors that followed even the vaguest of logic. The styling was best described as surreal. This, I imagined, was how all cars in the future would look.
Unfortunately I'm now a fully grown boy and the cars of the future don't look like TVRs at all. In fact, TVR went bust four years ago just as something called the Credit Crunch happened and the queue of people who wanted to spend £50,000 on a plastic sports car with Star Wars styling dried up. In these recession-ravaged times, new car buyers simply don't want something that's been styled by someone's dog.
After the Capri show had finished, I went back to the old Bristol Avenue factory - the same site I'd toured as a spotty 13-year-old - and was heartbroken by what I saw. Behind the empty building was a yard full of moulds used to make the old TVR models and a Cerbera coupe the company hadn't quite finished, and they were being left outside to rot away, untouched and unappreciated. It was of the saddest sights I've ever seen.
So to conclude TVRs are badly built out of plastic, styled with canine assistance and completely irrelevant to any car that's gone before or since. Which is why, after all these years, I still want one.