Last issue, we had followed the Triumph story up to 1973 and the introduction of the Dolomite Sprint. Those years had seen considerable changes on a corporate level, leading up to the creation of British Leyland in 1968 which left Triumph fighting its corner against previous rivals such as MG and Jaguar who were now the most uncomfortable of bedfellows. This, of course, was in addition to Rover who had been part of the same dysfunctional Leyland family since the end of 1966.
The Dolomite Sprint was very much a halo model for the small car range. It could have gone on to have even more of a halo effect from competition success, as Triumph's highspeed development engineer of the time, Gordon Birtwistle, recently related. 'The fledgling prototype rally version of the Dolomite Sprint, which was yet to be publicly announced, was without doubt remarkable in terms of performance and handling, especially when directly compared to similar solutions from other manufacturers at the time,' he told us. 'This was borne out by the very encouraging performance on the TAP Rally of Portugal in 1972, a round of the European Rally Championship, when Brian Culcheth and Johnstone Syer were holding third overall after nine special stages, including a ten lap race around the Estoril Grand Prix circuit which Brian won by half a lap! This stunned the rest of the field which contained some 30 Works cars from throughout Europe. Triumph's excitement, however, was short lived as a major failure of the rear axle angled top link brought things to an abrupt end.
'I was fortunate to have spent a lot of time testing and developing the Dolly Sprint rally car package, but insufficient test mileage – and particularly on rough terrain – meant that we did not highlight the weak point in the rear axle location.' Fortunately, this was not a weakness that showed up on road cars, and the Sprint was very well
