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TVR legend Peter Wheeler dies

Former TVR boss and celebrated British car industry raconteur, Peter Wheeler, passed away over the weekend following a brief illness.

Wheeler was a chemical engineer by trade and made his personal fortune supplying specialist engineering equipment to the North Sea oil industry.

His significance to the automotive industry started in 1981 when he took control of British performance car manufacturer TVR.

Under Wheeler’s control the Blackpool-based company built a veritable treasure trove of high-performance cars. His technical literacy and love of traditional front-engined, rear-wheel drive dynamics ensured Wheeler’s TVRs were a blend of both the superlative and suicidal.



Thoroughly unconventional yet pragmatic in his thinking, Wheeler eschewed the idea of anti-lock brakes, for example.

"The only purpose of ABS is to allow steering in wet conditions,” he maintained, adding that in extreme situations, “most modern cars understeer anyway."

TVR’s boss knew his cars were going to be driven in anger by those who purchased them, and designed the dynamic package to be as undiluted as possible.

Outrageously curvaceous bodywork was a key feature, as Wheeler famously once said, "a curved panel is stronger than a flat panel – that’s why our cars don’t have any flat panels." Ironically, this seemingly utilitarian design inflection - to render as much energy absorption via the bodywork as possible – produced some of the most disarmingly attractive cars ever made.

From the giant killing Griffith 500 (which embarrassed supercars throughout the 1990s) to the classic long nosed Cerbera, right up the last creations under Wheeler’s control (Tuscan, Tamora, Sagaris) TVRs were never contrived, least not in design, even less so in execution.

Journalists and competitors regularly pointed at his cars lack of sophistication (tubular chassis and plastic bodywork were de rigueur at TVR) and haphazard packaging (TVRs featured ergonomic oddity only rivaled by motorshow concepts), yet Wheeler was unmoved. TVR was in the business of building lightweight, dynamically challenging (some would say challenged) cars, and if you were a keen driver, you would understand.



TVR always remained proudly British under Wheeler’s tenure, powered by a succession of Rover-derived engines, either in-line six or V8 in configuration - suitably modified and re-engineered in-house by TVR Power.

Wheeler sold TVR to Russian oligarch Nikolai Smolenski in 2004 for around £15 million, proving the death knell for the Blackpool company, as it went into administration two years later – something which was excruciating for the proud Yorkshireman to witness from a distance.

A keen and quick driver – despite being nearly 2m tall – Wheeler campaigned a delightfully turned out Aston Martin DB4, followed by a magnificent TVR 5000M, in classic racing after he’d sold TVR.

During a race at Donington last year, he started feeling ill, and died on Friday, aged 64, comforted by his wife Vicky, and young children, nearly a year exactly after TVR founder, Trevor Wilkinson, passed way.

Able to put the fear of God into technically illiterate motoring scribes, Wheeler was perhaps the last great doyen of the British automotive industry – able to combine financial austerity, technical ability and a sense of independence, producing quintessentially British sportscars.

Wheeler was admired for having made TVR a world-beating performance car manufacturer whilst simultaneously engaging in those great Yorkshire traditions – being an avid Cricket supporter, hunting pheasant and mud-plugging in an assortment of Land Rovers and ex British military vehicles.

Right up to his death, Wheeler was involved with an extraordinarily ambitious amphibious vehicle project called Scamander.

Brilliantly quotable – Wheeler once quipped his sportscars were built to be, "relatively safe upside down, proven by customers" – his passing will surely not go uncelebrated. Some decidedly sideways track day action courtesy of the British TVR owners club is in the works.


 

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