Trident: The Car That Refused to Die
Some ideas outlive the people who conceived them. A cathedral design passes from one generation of stonemasons to the next, rising over centuries as the original architect's grandchildren finish what he started. A musical theme gets borrowed and reworked by composers who never met the man who first hummed it. What makes these ideas survive isn't just quality - it's that people who had no obligation to continue them decide they can't let them die. In 1965, a small sports car company designed a coupe so beautiful that even after the company went bankrupt, even after the body suppliers went under, even after the oil crisis killed the market for V8 sports cars, people kept building them anyway.
The Trident exists because enough people believed it deserved to, which in the chaotic world of 1960s British specialist car manufacturing was the only reason anything ever got built.
The Italian Suit on British Bones
TVR, the sports car maker from Blackpool with a habit of going bankrupt at inconvenient moments, commissioned the car in 1964. They wanted to move upmarket and challenge Jaguar, which meant creating something that looked expensive rather than simply fast. They hired Trevor Fiore, an English designer working for the Italian coachbuilder Carrozzeria Fissore, who drew a low, aggressive coupe with the sort of wedge shape that looked expensive in photographs. The plan was to wrap this Italian bodywork around a modified TVR Griffith chassis and drop in Ford's 4.7-litre 289 V8. Three prototypes were built for the 1965 Geneva Motor Show. People stopped and stared at them.
Then TVR went bankrupt, which was unfortunate timing given they'd just commissioned expensive Italian prototypes. The Trident project was suddenly orphaned, another promising design killed by insufficient capital and optimistic accounting.
Bill Last, one of TVR's dealers in Suffolk, looked at the car and decided it was too good to abandon. While the newly reformed TVR under Martin Lilley's ownership was sorting itself out, Last had already approached Fissore and secured the design rights directly from the Italians. When Lilley discovered this and claimed the Trident belonged to TVR, the matter ended up in legal dispute. Last won. He formed Trident Cars Ltd in Woodbridge and announced he'd build the car himself.
Bodies Made by Anyone Still Standing
The first Trident Clipper prototype appeared at the January 1966 Racing Car Show, though production didn't properly start until 1967. It looked almost identical to Fiore's prototype, still low and aggressive, but Last had made practical changes. The Italian steel and aluminium body became fibreglass, which was cheaper and easier to produce. The TVR chassis became an Austin-Healey 3000 frame, which at least you could actually buy. Under the bonnet sat the same Ford 289 V8, delivering around 270 horsepower. On paper, it could reach 150 miles per hour and hit 60 in five seconds, which made it competitive with far more expensive machinery.
The Italian coachbuilder that was supposed to supply bodies went bankrupt. This was not that surprising - Italian coachbuilders in the 1960s collapsed with the regularity of British trains running late. Last decided to make fibreglass bodies himself, which had the considerable advantage of being produced by a company that hadn't yet collapsed.
Production settled into a pattern: one or two cars per week, hand-built in a small workshop, first in Woodbridge and later in Ipswich. Most were sold as kits, which made them cheaper and avoided purchase tax complications. The cars cost £1,923 in kit form, which was expensive but not absurd compared to proper sports cars from established manufacturers.
When Austin-Healey stopped making the 3000 in 1968, Last switched to using Triumph TR6 chassis, lengthened to fit the Trident body. The TR6's wheelbase was five inches too short, so Trident welded inserts into the main rails, which was practical if not exactly sophisticated engineering. But it worked well enough, and the TR6 chassis brought independent suspension and disc brakes, which improved the handling considerably.
The Six-Cylinder Compromise
In 1969, Trident introduced the Venturer, which used Ford's 3.0-litre Essex V6 instead of the V8. It was the same car otherwise, still on the lengthened TR6 chassis, still wrapped in Fiore's elegant bodywork. Top speed dropped to 120 miles per hour and the sprint to 60 took eight seconds rather than five, but it cost less to build and appealed to customers who wanted the looks without the fuel consumption. About 84 Venturers were built, making it the most common Trident model.
In 1971, Trident added the Tycoon, which used a Triumph 2.5-litre straight-six and came with an automatic gearbox. This was aimed at gentlemen who wanted the appearance of a sports car without the inconvenience of changing gears themselves. Only six or seven were built. The market for automatic sports cars was evidently quite small.
The cars were, by every account that survives, fast and impressive machines. Raw, loud, everything a 1960s British GT car should be.
When Oil Killed Dreams
The 1973 oil crisis arrived and killed the market for big V8 sports cars almost overnight. When petrol prices quadrupled and governments started rationing fuel, hand-built sports cars that consumed it enthusiastically stopped being viable. For tiny operations like Trident, it was fatal. Production stopped in 1974.
There was a brief revival attempt in 1976. Last tried launching a revised Clipper with American safety bumpers and updated styling aimed at the US market. Only two cars were built before the company closed for good in 1977. In total, Trident built around 85 cars: approximately 30 to 39 Clippers, 45 to 49 Venturers, and 6 or 7 Tycoons, depending on which sources you trust.
The Idea That Lasted
The cathedral took five centuries to complete. The musical theme got borrowed so often nobody remembers who wrote it. The Trident managed neither achievement. It was born from one company's bankruptcy, built by a dealer who had no business manufacturing cars, and killed by an oil crisis that destroyed the entire market it served.
Eighty-five cars isn't commercial success by any reasonable measure. But those 85 exist because Bill Last looked at a beautiful design and decided letting it die was worse than the considerable risk of building it himself. The body suppliers failed. The chassis suppliers stopped production. The oil crisis eliminated the customers. Last kept building them anyway, which describes both the man's determination and the entire British specialist car industry's relationship with financial reality.
Most Tridents survive now in photographs and the memories of people who heard them on Suffolk lanes. The car never conquered anything. It barely survived long enough to prove it could be built. But it exists, which given everything that tried to kill it feels like enough.
