When Eileen Brown drove her beloved Triumph Spitfire in the summer of 2021, for the first time in more than 20 years, she burst into “floods of tears”.
Not because she was “terrified” after years of driving big muscle cars, but because of the blood, sweat and tears shed by her husband Steve, who had painstakingly restored the little car during Covid lockdowns.
“It was the thought that he had done that for me, it was really special,” says Eileen, who has owned the Spitfire since September 1982.
“He didn’t buy me a gift, he spent hundreds of hours rebuilding this ratty little car that’s got no power whatsoever, and he did it just for me. Nobody’s ever done anything like that for me before. I’m tearing up now!”
Eileen, 63, was just 21 when she bought the car at auction, and she was already hopelessly devoted to it by the time she married Steve five years later.
“When we got married, when it came to the ‘and all my worldly goods I thee endow’, I mouthed silently ‘except the Spitfire’,” she laughs. “He just grinned, because I’d told him I was going to say it.”
Even when the Triumph was laid up for all those years, there was never any consideration given to selling it.
“It’s been with me for so long, and you don’t discard family members just because they’re getting a bit past it,” she explains.
Eileen’s first car was also bought from an auction, where her parents were regular customers.
“My parents owned Aycliffe stock car stadium, and they used to go to the car auctions all the time,” she says. “They bought me a diarrhoea coloured Mini Clubman, which I hated on sight.
“I hardly ever drove it and they got rid of it. My second car, which I think I bought for myself for £200, was a white Marina TC 1800 and I had that for ages until it fell apart.
“Then my boyfriend at the time bought me a Fiat Mirafiori, which was a complete rot box, and I remember him getting rid of it for a fiver. That was £850 down the drain.”
Then came the ‘76 Spitfire, though Eileen had her eye on an emerald green Triumph TR7 for sale in the same auction.
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“Dad said not to go anywhere near the TR7, even though I loved it,” she says. “He said the head gaskets went on the TR7 back then, and said they were horrible cars.”
So Eileen bid for the Spitfire and, when the hammer came down, her bid of £950, plus £6 auctioneer commission, was enough to secure the car.
“It sold within 10 seconds, because it was a repossession and the dealers won’t touch anything that doesn’t have a V5,” she remembers. “They like to move cars on quickly, whereas I wasn’t bothered waiting three weeks for a V5 to come through.
“My dad’s friend drove it the 40 miles home, with me in the passenger seat, just to check it was sound.”
When she bought it, the 46,000-mile Spitfire had been accessorised in true ‘80s style.
“All round the back behind the driver’s seat was red fun fur, spray-tipped with black gloss paint,” says Eileen. “It looked a bit like a boudoir in the back, and it also had a really tiny steering wheel.
“I ripped the fur out and left it with the strips of glue for years and years, and dad, who ran a car accessories shop, put a bigger British Leyland steering wheel on it.”
So what were her first impressions of the Pimento red Triumph?
“That it was really fast and really powerful,” she laughs. “I absolutely loved it, and I took it everywhere, all over the country.”
When she joined the merchant navy, she was posted to college in Cardiff, a long way from her Darlington home.
“They send you as far away from home as possible so you can get your independence,” she says. “I drove there and back for about six months without any problems at all, although the tank only does about 210 miles, so I spent a lot of time in petrol stations filling up.
“I remember everybody at college was tinkering under their cars, and one of the greatest things about the Spitfire is when you want to work on the engine you open the bonnet and sit on the wheel, because the whole of the engine is completely open.
“I did quite a lot of work on it, including fitting some self bleeding brake nipples. When I met Steve, I was equally as handy as he was, but I’ve got lazy now and I let him do it.”
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Steve was also in the merchant navy when the couple met in 1985, and they regularly used the Spitfire for holidays over the next decade.
“We used to go away for a week or a long weekend, and we’d get a week’s worth of clothing in there,” she says. “I remember driving over the Forth Bridge in the rain when we went to Comrie, near Perth, and going back to Cardiff to visit college friends.
“It leaked terribly in the rain, even though the hood has rain channels. I’d have to drive with one hand at the top of the driver’s window to stop the rain coming in from the corner of the soft top. We eventually bought a hard top because the soft top was starting to sag.”
Clothes weren’t the only cargo on some of Eileen and Steve’s trips.
“When we were living in Bromley we’d also take our cats back up to Darlington with us,” she smiles. “We’d have at least two cats just roaming in the car. One of them used to sit on my lap with his paws on the steering wheel.”
Unfortunately, the car spent much of its time outside, even when there was a garage available.
“It was in a garage for a couple of years, but then Steve agreed to renovate somebody’s MGB so the Spitfire went out on the drive again,” says Eileen. “It was very neglected, but when we moved into this house in 2000 it finally went into the back of the garage. It was completely unloved, though, because this house needed so much doing to it. The Spitfire was the absolute last thing on our minds, we didn’t drive it, and it wasn’t taxed.” Here it is pictured in 2019.
In the years leading up to the Triumph’s long incarceration, Eileen had other cars to drive, indulging her passion for American muscle cars.
They include a Pontiac Fiero and a Pontiac Trans Am, which rotted so badly that Steve decided to use its chassis and engine to build a Dax Cobra.
“We built an extension to the front of the garage, and the Spitfire sat at the back and got forgotten for years and years,” she says.
Some work had already been done, however, including a replacement engine at about 100,000 miles, a brand new chassis at the end of the ‘90s, a replacement gearbox fitted with overdrive from a Triumph GT6, and a new hood.
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But as time ticked on, Steve says the car had become “the elephant in the room”.
“Every time I went into the garage, there it was looking all forlorn and shabby,” he adds. “I’d taken bits off over the years, and put them in boxes, while the engine was somewhere in the garage.
“I was often thinking ‘what do we do with it?’, but then closed the garage door and forgot about it for a bit.”
And then Covid struck, which provided Steve with the opportunity to finally bite the bullet.
“I had the time and I thought ‘that poor old car’s been sitting in that garage for 20 years’,” he says.
“Either we throw it away, or do something with it. So I decided that now’s the time, let’s get the car back to drivable condition, and it just snowballed.”
Eileen remembers boxes starting to arrive during the first lockdown in spring 2020, and Steve would say “this is for the Spitfire”.
“He lived in the garage during Covid,” she says. “He didn’t really track how much he spent, and I don’t want to know.”
Those boxes included a multitude of parts, including new brake lines, hoses, suspension components, clutch, wiring loom, carpets, and seat foam and covers.
Steve got busy with his welder to sort out corroded sills and floor sections, repaired any issues with the chassis, including repainting and filling the box sections with rust inhibitor, and flipped the car over to seal the underside.
“A friend of mine said he could paint the body, which was useful,” he says. “So we put the body on the chassis then it went away for about six weeks.”
“When we were deciding on the colour, Steve was insisting it wasn’t Pimento red, but I kept saying it was,” adds Eileen. “But I remembered it before it got faded and tatty. Let’s face it, we’ve all faded after 40 years.
“And when we took all the bits off and he took the underseal off the bonnet clips, underneath was the exact colour of the original car, and I was bang on.”
While the body was away, Steve stripped the engine and replaced parts as required, before it was eventually lowered back in with a hoist.
Keen observers will note the bonnet, a GT6 fibreglass replacement complete with bonnet bulge.
“The poor old bonnet was too far gone, with corrosion around the wheel arches,” says Steve. “To buy a brand new one was quite expensive, and I found this on eBay. It’s not a corrosion trap like the original, and it’s a lot lighter.”
The seats had similarly decayed, with replacement foam and covers, as well as carpets and other trim pieces, coming from specialist Triumph trimmers Park Lane Classics.
Steve rejuvenated the walnut dash, and cleaned and reproofed the hood.
He added some of modern safety features – including an up-to-date fuse box with 10 rated fuses replacing the original three 35amp ones; an immobiliser; and a hidden tap to turn off the fuel at the tank.
“I work in a risk averse industry, inspecting pressure vessels to ensure they don’t explode, and over the years I’ve seen too many cars that have been burnt out,” he says. “So I’ve mitigated the risk by ensuring, for example, the fuel hose is suitable for ethanol fuels, and the battery is isolated from the rest of the circuit.”
In the summer of 2021, the Spitfire was finally back on the road, with its first significant journey to the Heveningham Hall car show.
“I drove there at a ridiculously low speed,” says Eileen. “It was terrifying because I drive big muscle cars of more than 300hp, and this has got 79.
“It’s pretty gutless and it’s about the size of a roller skate compared to most other cars. On the A12, I was terrified of going above 50mph. Over the last 20 years every car has got larger, even a Mini is bigger than this now. I don’t think my fear has increased, just the size of the cars.”
As for the future, the Triumph is going nowhere, as long as Eileen can comfortably get in and out.
“We will sell it, and the set point is when I can no longer get up from a low seat without using my hands, or without grunting,” she says.
“So I practise every day to get off the bottom stair in the house with no hands and no grunts, because that’s about the height of the Spitfire seat. As soon as I need to haul myself out, or my knees or hips go, I’ll have to sell it. Who knows when that’s going to be – another 10 years maybe?”
