Triumph TR2 Long Door

The first TR2s, from TS1 in July 1953 to TS4001 in October 1954, had doors that reached down to the bottom of the body, with no sill below them. From TS4002 the doors were shorter and a separate sill panel (rocker panel) ran beneath them. Revington TR's list of change points gives TS4002 as the first short-door car; TR-Register Deutschland says the long door ran "bis" TS4002, which may mean up to it or up to and including it. The Rimmer catalogue's table makes the same break between the 1954 and 1955 model years, at TS4001.

No source read gives the factory's reason for the change. Nor does any count the cars of each kind: the TR Register's round figure above is the nearest any comes, and TR-Register Deutschland says that not every commission number was used. American owners, polled by their club in the spring of 1955, put the doors' closeness to the kerb among the things they liked least, and the owner in the film below gives the reason as he understands it, "so that when the door was opened it would no longer hit curbs".⁠source 1​source 2​source 4​source 5​source 6

Revington TR dates the changes; the factory's workshop manual gives the numbers at which parts changed, for service. Where the two give different numbers, both are shown.

Revington's note on the rear hub seals adds a verdict:

The steering gear stayed cam and lever throughout, by the brochure and the manual. The Triumph TR2 specs give the brakes, wheels and the rest as built.⁠source 1​source 7​source 8​source 4

A hardtop was offered before the cars were built for one. Motor Sport's editor drove a "Triumph TR2 hard-top" at the Guild of Motoring Writers' day at Goodwood on 24 October 1954, and his note of the day mentions "a loose floor panel". Every car from TS5260, in February 1955, was built to take one, and from TS6820, the manual says, the holes for the hood and hardtop brackets were drilled at the factory; earlier cars needed drilling.

At the London show of October 1955 Motor Sport listed a TR2 hard-top two-seater at £950 5s 10d with purchase tax, and Boddy noted that Triumph offered "a hard-top version of the in-any-case closeable TR2". In America the hardtop model was listed at $2,695 in 1955, and Cal Specialities of Gardena sold a hardtop kit for $315. No source read says who made the hardtop, what it was made of, or how many were sold.⁠source 9​source 1​source 7​source 10​source 11​source 12​source 13

Overdrive was an extra on every TR2 roadster: a Laycock de Normanville unit with a ratio of 0.82, which made overdrive top 3.03 overall against the direct top gear's 3.7. On the early cars it was switched by a push-pull control on the dashboard, and Motor Trend noted its limit:

It cost $154 in America in 1954. On Boddy's test car in Britain the engine pulled overdrive top from 1,500 rpm. From TS6157, in May 1955, Revington TR records overdrive on second, third and top, with an egg-shaped switch in place of the pull-out one; the factory manual has a redesigned overdrive unit from TS5980 and separate instructions for adding second and third. The two may be steps of one change, but no source read says so.⁠source 8​source 7​source 14​source 15​source 1

The factory's brochure of December 1953 listed these optional extras: aero screens, overdrive, a heater, a radio, undershields, special rear shock absorbers, high-speed tyres, stiff front road springs, an aluminium engine oil sump, dual-speed screen wipers, a fitted luggage trunk, telescopic steering, a special steering wheel, knock-on wire wheels, rear wheel covers, leather upholstery, fabric and metal tonneau covers, and a tool roll with tools. Several were parts of the speed trim worn by the car of the Jabbeke speed test.

Motor Trend printed the American prices of some of them in May 1954. No price list read gives the British prices.⁠source 8​source 14

TS1 and TS2 were white, with Geranium leather. The car Motor Trend drove early in 1954, the first TR2 to reach the West Coast by its account, was white too, with "rosy upholstery" set off by a red hood and side curtains, while the car on Triumph's stand at the New York show that spring was black, "a sober black", Motor Sport thought, which "did not show up so well against the ivory and red".

The factory's list of TR2 paint and trim colours was not found in any source read. In Belgium, by a Belgian owner's account in Moss Motoring in 2002, Impéria would paint a car any colour the buyer wanted.⁠source 1​source 16​source 17​source 18

The Rimmer catalogue's table dates the commission numbers by the year in which each car was built. A "1952 TR2" is the 20TS prototype.

The same table gives model years too: the 1954 model year runs from TS1 to TS4001, the long-door cars, and the 1955 model year from TS4002 to TS8636, the short-door cars. Triumph TR2 chassis numbers explains how to read a car's plate and date it.⁠source 4​source 1​source 19

About two-thirds of all TR2s were exported, by the home and export lines in the TR Register's table and the Rimmer catalogue's, and the TR Register calls the United States "by far the main market" across the whole TR series. Left-hand-drive cars, for the right-hand side of the road, are found with an L after the commission number, as on TS299L. No source read describes a version built for America: Motor Trend's test of 1954 and the owners' poll of 1955 note none, and what differed there was how the car was sold.

In America it was sold by a new company, Standard-Triumph Motor Co., with offices in Los Angeles and New York by April 1954, and by two distributors, Cal Sales of Gardena, California, in the west and South Eastern Motors of Hollywood, Florida, in the east; Canada had The Standard Motor Co. (Canada) of Toronto. South Eastern Motors admitted to the owners' club in April 1955 that parts service in the east had been inadequate. Sports Cars Illustrated counted the TR2 among the imports under $3,000. The owners' club polled 227 American owners in 1955: they had chosen the car for its first cost, its performance, its looks, its economy and its room inside, and practically all of them were getting about 7.4 to 8.4 litres per 100 km (28 to 32 miles to the US gallon).

In Belgium, Impéria had built Standard Vanguards under licence at Nessonvaux, between Liège and Verviers, and went on to assemble TR2s from kits, left-hand drive with a metric dashboard, to avoid import tax.

The Belgian cars kept their places in the TS sequence, with an N, for Nessonvaux, stamped after the number and its L: TS 4393 LN, a coupé, is one. Impéria also designed and built its own closed version, the coupé, and closed its factory in 1958.

Elsewhere the TR2 was sold, not built. In Germany it cost DM 9,450 new, according to TR-Register Deutschland, and in Hong Kong the distributor, Far East Motors, prepared the three TR2s that took the first Macau Grand Prix's top three places in 1954. No other assembly of the TR2 outside Britain was found in the sources read.⁠source 2​source 4​source 20​source 1​source 21​source 22​source 23​source 18​source 16​source 24​source 25​source 6​source 14​source 26​source 5​source 27