Triumph TR6 Review

The earliest account read is the American importer's own. Its owners' newsletter introduced the car in January 1969 with its new body, its wider wheels, its front anti-roll bar and its redesigned cockpit, and the newsletter's editor, after a short drive, found the ride "firm but not harsh" and the engine responsive; "The TR-6 corners much flatter than the 250," he wrote. It was a house magazine, not an independent test.

Autocar tested a TR6 PI in its issue of 17 April 1969. No source read reprints it in full, but the TR Register prints its figures and its verdict:

In America, Road & Track found the carburetted US TR6 almost exactly as quick as the TR250 it replaced, Aaron Severson writes; reviewers, he adds, found the ride and handling more composed than the TR250's, though the anti-roll bar made for pronounced understeer, "where the early TR4 would hang out its tail at will". Car and Driver tested the car in February 1969, a test no source read reprints, and in August Popular Science timed an American TR6 in its group test of "The $3,000 Roadsters", a time that is among the specifications' readings.⁠source 4​source 1​source 3​source 5

For its issue of March 1971 Motor Sport collected a TR6 PI from Standard-Triumph's press depot at Acton, and found that the British sports car had grown up:

It was very quick on the open road, with "previously undiscovered bends appearing on familiar roads and journey times shrinking impressively", its steering was light, and its seats and hood (soft top) were good. Its cornering was "less 'scientific' than in cars like Lotus, Alfa Romeo, etc., but it clings on excellently". The faults were a fierce clutch, pinking on the half-tank of fuel it came with, a whining fuel pump, a heater that did little unless the flap in front of the windscreen (windshield) was opened, and headlamps "trying to burn a hole in the road". The magazine thought it good value, and a worthy successor to the Austin-Healey 3000.

Two years later the magazine's assistant editor, Clive Richardson, put his own money into a new TR6, despite his colleagues' jibes ("What on earth do you want one of those lorries for?"). It had stood two months in a dealer's open compound, and it arrived, he wrote, "very second-hand". Its handling was "nowhere near as bad as those who have never driven TR6s try to make out", with safe understeer, and the hardtop cut the scuttle shake of the open car. In November he admitted that "over the last 5,000 miles I have grown to love it. It has character". A year later, after a specialist's service, it was "utterly reliable", and, if Triumph's quality control and finish could be relied on, he called the TR6 good value for anyone who wanted a relatively powerful open two-seater: "after all it is one of the few remaining examples of a dying breed of car".

The magazine's readers were divided. When one complained in 1973 of a car whose injection had never worked properly, the editor added that a member of staff could tell a similar tale, "A pity, for hairy British sports cars are few and far between"; another reader that year called the TR6 "one of the rare delights of modern motoring", and in 1974 a third, who disliked its injection, still thought that "a TR6 in good form is a great machine and good value for money".⁠source 2​source 6​source 7​source 8

In America the TR6 aged faster. Road & Track, introducing a comparison of sports cars and sports saloons (sedans) in June 1974, set its own figures for 11 cars tested in 1972 and 1973, the TR-6 among them, in approximate order of price, and the magazine concluded that, in the low and middle price ranges, saloons and sporty coupés were giving sports cars a hard time. When the TR7 arrived, Car and Driver compared it with the old car:

Aaron Severson sums up the critics who tested the late TR6: they conceded its "rugged good looks and an entertaining basso profundo exhaust note, but in other respects, the Triumph seemed increasingly anachronistic", above all beside the Datsun 240Z, and the federal fuel-economy test for the 1974 model year gave it what he calls "a dismal 16.4 mpg", in US gallons. In 1976 an owner wrote to the importer's newsletter to complain that the magazines, Car and Driver among them in a test that October, kept calling the TR6 antiquated, draughty and hard-riding. Owners bought it all the same, and the US TR6 page has what they found.⁠source 9​source 10​source 11​source 3​source 12

Half a century on, Classic & Sports Car drove a TR6 against a Datsun 240Z and found the Triumph the wilder of the two:

Driving it hard, the magazine wrote, was "like being strapped to the back of a rocket over which you only loosely have control"; and, set beside the Datsun, "the Triumph only does white-knuckle rides".⁠source 13