TVR GRIFFITH

IN ASSOCIATION WITH LANCASTER INSURANCE

When TVR pulled the wraps off its new Griffith at the 1990 British Motor Show, the collective intake of breath from the world’s motoring media was entirely genuine. The Blackpool-based manufacturer had spent the past decade or so bolting bits of extra plastic onto a series of Seventies-inspired wedge-shaped sports cars in a bid to keep its hand-built roadsters look at least vaguely up to date, but the Griffith was something entirely different.

It was an organically beautiful car, pretty from every angle as if someone had taken an early Jaguar E-Type roadster and updated it all round. It’s probably no coincidence, then, that the Griffith and the Jaguar XK8 have a very similar front profile even if the Jaguar arrived half a decade later.

In 1990, there was nothing that looked quite like the Griffith, and from its tiny stand in the corner of Hall 4 of the NEC, TVR generated more column inches than the Renault Clio and almost as many as the new Ford Escort – which was Britain’s bestseller