The Brave Pill: TVR Chimaera
Mean, green, no garage queen - keen?
Last week's Maserati 4200GT proved to be the most easily swallowed Pill so far, with much love for its combination of presence, performance and a four-figure price. With that in mind we're going to stick with the SAS's conflation of daring and winning with this one, a similarly inexpensive TVR.
I honestly can't remember the first time I saw a Ferrari or a Lamborghini in the wild. Youthful memories have blended with magazines, movies and the searing dramatic heights of Magnum PI. But I do vividly recall the first time I saw a TVR Chimera. It was the summer of 1993 and it did nothing more than drive past on an urban street, stop at a set of traffic lights and then burble off again. Even at low speeds it was the most V8-y V8 that I'd ever heard, and the rest of the car looked similarly outrageous.
TVRs became faster, louder and more outrageous as the 'nineties became the 'noughties, but the Chimaera's combination of brutish charm and an enticing price made it TVR's most successful model of all time, with around 6000 produced. Back in 1994 you could buy one for £26,250, pretty much exactly half the £53,995 of a base 911, with the Chimera being a half second quicker to 60mph. These days it is the cheapest way into the brand's post-wedge era with values substantially under those of the closely related Griffith.
But are you brave enough for this one? It's fair to say that TVRs of this era have never enjoyed a stellar reputation for turn key reliability and they can still fall victim to some expensive maladies. This week's pill gives a good indication of what the bottom of the market looks like these days, a privately-sold 1996 4.0-litre car with some visual imperfections and a bilious green interior with a price tag that just dips into four figures.
It certainly offers plenty of bang for your buck. The Rover-sourced 4.0-litre engine produced a relaxed 240hp as it left the factory and the advert reports this one has been given a few upgrades since. While the headline power output might not sound like much by modern standards the Chim's lightweight construction and glassfibre bodywork means that it weighs pretty much exactly the same as a current MX-5, while still accommodating a chunky V8. Okay, the Mazda would look after you much better in a crash - as in, at all - but the TVR is still properly rapid. Even in 2019 a sub-5 second 0-60mph time is nothing to be sneezed at; in 1992 it was one of the fastest cars on the road.
Handling sophistication will be more limited, of course. Wheeler-era TVRs drove well providing you arrived at them with realistic expectations, fundamentally a desire to experience the adjective stretching straight line performance more than an urge to chase hot hatches down country lanes. Power steering was an option on early Chimaeras - bizarrely a certain type of driver still regarded it as a bit sissy - but the under-bonnet shots show that this one does have the pump that indicates fitment. There's no ABS or traction control though; those really were for jessies.
But the Chimaera's appeal was never just about performance or even that NASCAR soundtrack. It pretty much exemplified the canny way that Peter Wheeler ran TVR at the time, a simple recipe that propelled the brand to unprecedented success. The company's cars had to be fast and enticingly priced, but they also had to look good - the detail that other low volume sportscar makers tended to neglect. The Chimaera's styling has aged remarkably well, muscular but much less extreme than the models that followed it. The scalloped leading door edges might have been because of the difficulty of creating a tight shutline with a conventional fit, but what a simple, clever solution it was.
It's the same story in the cabin. While most hand-built sportscars feel their flakiest inside, the Chimaera has proper trim, a couple of cows' worth of leather and a nicely angled wooden dashboard. The rotary heating controls still look good, as does the bulbous gear lever that barely rises from the fat centre console. Okay, our pill's interior has a greenish Kermit-and-biscuit scheme that only Miss Piggy could truly love. But even a hater couldn't claim it looks lashed-up or thrown together.
Mechanically the Chimaera is about as safe a bet as a TVR can be. The Rover engine is an entirely known quantity and parts availability is total. Although a pre-facelift car, this one is still late enough to have the beefier Borg-Warner gearbox in place of the earlier, and more chocolaty, Rover LT77. The vendor of our Pill reports various changes, including the fitment of coilovers and polybushes in the front suspension and ARB, but is also offering to return most of the original parts for anyone who wants to take it back to stock.
Despite glassfibre bodywork the big risk with any Chimaera is rust, specifically in the steel outriggers that hold the body to the chassis. Fixing these means lifting the body clear - welding and composite not really getting on - so it's not a simple task. Wishbones also fall prey to tinworm with this car's MOT history reporting that the fronts were "corroded but not seriously weakened" as an advisory last year. Anyone interested should take a torch and a screwdriver or, better still, a proper expert.
But even if it does need some sympathetic spend, the Chimaera looks like an solid bet. Values have long since stopped falling, indeed good ones seem to be creeping up. The Griffith from the same era is sleeker and sportier - but it's not twice as good, which is where the market is currently valuing it. As a long term investment this Chimaera could be a very clever Trevor.
It's basically a kit car, after all, so relatively easy to fix
Of are we into a different kind of 'brave'? My Griffith was the most lethal handling car I've ever driven (and since that includes rear-engined Skodas, that's probably saying something).
If Neanderthals had built sports cars...
I did a computer analysis of the rear suspension that showed, under certain circumstances, the rear roll geometric roll centre (which is one of the things that governs weight transfer characteristics) would jump from one side of the car, across and up to the other side. In terms of forces, it's a bit like a latching mechanism going over-centre, causing an instantaneous shift in the loads on the tyre contact patches.
TVR's look nice, make a lovely sound, and go well in a straight line, but their engineering would make Ralph Nader have a dicky fit.
...Which is why I went to the trouble of measuring up and analysing the suspension geometry. It's a field I used to specialise in, for competition cars.
It continually astonishes me that owners persist in making excuses for the things, when the truth is that they are simply an ill-handling, unreliable P.O.S... albeit one that looks pretty and makes a nice noise.
Oh, and 340bhp?
...My Griffith 500 was one of the alleged 340bhp models, and it made a genuine 270bhp, on a good day.
ks quite frankly... Why don't you have a look and tell us the best result you can find by a Grimaera?
I'll give you a starter for 10: check out 71st position (out of 95!) in the 2009 Championship.
When the flag drops, the bulls
t stops...Woah, that's big league stuff! He'd have been mixing it with 1275cc Minis and Vauxhall Novas!
Not quite up there with the Audi A3's, but then what can you expect with only 4 litres to play with?
Custard test, please:show us the actual result, or it never happened.
I can't imagine any sort of open event at Prescott where a Grimaera could come anywhere close to taking FTD (and that's no particular disrespect to the TVR: they will usually be running against purpose-designed wings-and-slicks single seaters. I visit Prescott a lot, and I can't recall even seeing one put up a competitive showing in its class, much less FTD.
The point is that nobody who has ever tried to race or hillclimb a Grimaera can, if both you and the results can be believed.
Either the car is crap, or everyone who has ever driven it is. Which is the more likely, do you think?
The evidence speaks for itself... if Grimearas were anything like competent, they would have made a decent showing for themselves in motorsport.
They haven't.
Like I said, when the flag drops...
His Griff was a pup and the world must never forget.
Their engineering is fundamentally shonky.
Hell, anyone with even the most basic knowledge of structures will tell you that a backbone chassis - with its low second moment of area - only works even reasonably effectively because you can make it a continuous, fully-enclosed section.
So what did the Blackpool Donkeys do? Left it completely open and unbraced on the bottom, thus destroying that continuity:
And you can't even see on that pic the tubes at the front that have been deliberately buckled to clear the steering arms.
Honestly, they have a pretty plastic bodyshell, but what lies underneath it is enough to make the skin crawl of anyone with any engineering sensibilities.
For reference:
- the torsional stiffness of a Grimaera chassis is about 2,650lb.ft/degree.
- the torsional stiffness of a bare Elan backbone chassis is about 4,500lb.ft/degree, despite being a lot lighter (it only weighs 45kg) and being fitted to a much lighter overall, lower powered, and more softly sprung car.
I think I'd be embarrassed to admit that my 1990's sports car on 205/225 section tyres could only 'distinctly not be left behind' by a 1960's sports car on tall profile, 155 section tyres, on a smooth track...
The Elan's handling balance is fabulous, but its outright levels of grip are really very modest, by modern standards. Any even halfway competent modern sportscar ought to be able to leave it for dead on a racetrack - it's on bumpy backroads where the superior (and surprisingly soft) suspension means it can still hold its own, even these days.
At risk of upsetting the TVR fanbois by using big words that they don't understand, all backbone chassis are fundamentally limited, because they suffer from a low second moment of area. But they can be made to work well by ensuring that their low second moment of area is at least a 'perfect' structure, with no discontinuities; whereas other chassis types for open cars offer a much higher second moment of area, but invariably have big, unbraced 'holes', to fit inconvenient things like people into them.
The TVR makes a fantastic job of getting it wrong on both counts. Whoever designed it clearly had a very weak understanding of structures.
What it needs is to be properly and fully triangulated and - more importantly - to have a proper fully stressed closure to the underside of the engine bay and transmission tunnel (not the half-arsed, laser-cut flat sheet that bolts in under the transmission areas and does f
k all).But torsional stiffness is only half it's problem. The other major limitation is the suspension geometry. Even setting aside the issue with rear roll centre, the decision to adapt Sierra front hub carriers (which were designed for MacPherson strut) left it with badly flawed steering geometry. It's possibly unfair to pick on the TVR for this, as it's a common problem with a lot of other kit cars of that era, which were trying to make do and mend with the cheapest and most readily available components that existed at the time. A few extra quid spent on bespoke hubs and uprights would have avoided the issue, but someone at Blackpool decided, rightly or wrongly, that cost was more important than competence.
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