Britain has a fantastic sports car tradition with motors such as the Austin Healey, the Jaguar E-Type and generations of MGs.

Part of this proud heritage is the Triumph TR series with the notable exception of the TR7, effectively the last of the line and more of a sad footnote than a worthy chapter in motoring history.

It was 1974 and British Leyland bosses wanted a replacement for the gutsy and gorgeous TR6 which was about to be crippled in the US market by emissions clampdowns and safety demands.

So they brought in designer Harris Mann, the bloke who brought us the Allegro and the Princess – enough said really.

Mann sketched a wedge-shaped two-seater with a hard top on the back of a fag packet and was told to build it.

Of course, being BL in the 1970s, it had to be done on the cheap, so they rustled through the parts bin and came up with an underpowered Dolomite engine and a gearbox from a Marina.

It was a bit like watching an episode of Scrapheap Challenge. And when manufacturing was given to a rabble of mutinous Scousers in Speke, everyone knew it was doomed before it had started.

The motoring Press panned the TR7 from its tepid performance to its hideous tartan seats.

At the 1975 Geneva Motor Show, legendary designer Giorgetto Giugiaro took one look, walked around it and exclaimed: “Oh my! They’ve done it to the other side as well!”

On the B-roads, home of the British sports car, the TR7 was chewed up by foreign invaders such as the Golf GTi and the ‘baby Ferrari’ Fiat X1/9.

Attempts to get Joanna Lumley’s character in The New Avengers and Martin Shaw in The Professionals to drive one on the TV dramas couldn’t paper over the cracks.

Purists took one look, jumped back into their TR6s.

Attempts to beef things up by shoehorning a Rover V8 into the car for the US market and calling it the TR8 were too little too late.

The car was sent to Coventry, not just by BL which closed the Speke factory, but by many drivers hankering after a genuine Triumph.

The final damning statistic was that throughout its tormented seven-year life, the car was almost continually outsold by the MGB, a car with a 1960s design which BL had hoped it would ultimately replace.