This Griffith is a lightweight V8 TVR that you can buy at Revival

One of the rare delights on offer is a 1965 Griffith 200, very much the new model’s inspiration and, with a guide price of £70-80,000, not so different on the price front either.

The Griffith 200 was a fibreglass-bodied TVR Grantura with a Ford V8 stuffed into its nose in the Anglo-American manner of the Shelby Cobra. Normal British Granturas had polite four-pot Ford Kent or BMC B-series engines, so give one of these lightweight “bitsa” cars a booming 4.7-litre Ford bent eight with 195bhp and oodles of torque and you can imagine the result. It flew. 

Almost 200 were produced. While regular Grantura production carried on in Blackpool some bodies and chassis were exported to US car dealer Jack Griffith who converted them to V8 spec – not much more to that than shoehorning the engine in apparently – and sold them in America as Griffiths. In the US it was never a TVR Griffith, just the Griffith 200.

The car Bonhams is selling at Revival on Saturday September 9^th was originally sold new by a Ford dealership in Alaska where it proved itself in… ice racing. It swapped snow for sun in the early 1990s with a move to California and a new owner who fully restored the car, complete with new chassis, but who otherwise kept it original.

It then became one of very few Griffith 200s to make the journey back across the pond. It did that in 2001 since when the hairiest-chested TVR has had a busy time in historic sports car racing. Fully prepared for racing and uprated in all the right places, it even went back to the US in 2007 whereupon it showed just how fast a Griffith 200 could fly by hitting 150mph on the Daytona Speedway banking.

Despite its racing credentials the car is said today to be far from a stripped-out racer, but fully UK road legal while still retaining eligibility for a wide variety of historic events. Bonhams says the car is entirely useable with carpeting and full complement of Smiths dials in the correct-spec cabin. Bonhams also says the engine was rebuilt less than 200 miles ago and the car is all ready and raring to go.

So, new TVR or old Griffith 200? With either you will surely have a giant-killer of a car…the Griffith 200 could, after all, show an E-Type a clean pair of heels.