You read the title correctly. There’s a Triumph TR8 for sale in the urbane and international city of Tampa, which is in Florida. Miraculously, the sporty convertible has traveled just 90 miles since 1981.
It’s beige, malaise, and showroom fresh, so let’s have a look.
The Buy/Drive/Burn series has been all about convertibles lately. We started with some $40,000 luxury entries from 2010, then upped the dollar figure with three more from 2009 that asked over $90,000 for the pleasure of their company.
Today we step back in time to the year 2001, and spend even more money. The cheapest drop-top here is over $120,000. Let’s go.
Our recent Rare Rides entry on the Bugatti EB110 quickly sussed out a couple of mid-90s competitors in the comments section. Today, we’ll visit the trio and pick one to take home.
An entrant each from France, England, and Italy; all of them failures in their own right. Which big money flop will it be?
The looks of an old Volkswagen Jetta, the reliability of an old Italian car, and the inconvenience of right-hand drive. All of your dreams can come true in today’s Rare Ride — a Fiat Tempra. It made its way from 1990s Italy to England, then stormed up the banks of Rhode Island.
They’re big, expensive, luxurious, and have 12 cylinders sitting under their long hoods. All of them will deplete your checkbook in multiple ways, but you can only take one home with you.
What’s it gonna be?
The Jensen Interceptor brought together American power and British design and craftsmanship in a rare heavyweight sports-luxury liftback.
The company even made a few of them into convertibles, like today’s Rare Ride.
Today’s Rare Ride is the inaugural post for Lotus in this series. We did have a brief British brush with the brand in the Isuzu I-Mark RS, which featured a suspension tuned by the then GM-owned Lotus engineering experts.
Let’s see the sort of car Lotus produced when it wasn’t under the influence of The General.
Today’s Rare Ride hails from beyond the normal reaches of even astute car enthusiasts’ knowledge base. It was the brainchild of some British executives who were convinced there was a market for the classic London Taxi in the United States. In addition to standard taxis, the company offered one that was thoroughly luxed and broughamed.
I’m just not sure.
The other day, we brought you news of an electrified Bentayga, as the crew from Crewe decided to electrify their SUV with a 10.8 kWh lithium-ion battery pack. At the time, we mentioned the possibility of a gasoline-fired V8 engine showing up in the near future.
Well, that didn’t take long, with Bentley announcing today the introduction of a 4.0-liter, twin-turbocharged V8, set to make 542 bhp (about 550 hp, awaiting certification) and 568 lb-ft of torque. You know what else has a 4.0-liter twin turbo? That’s right, the Lamborghini Urus.
Our last Rare Ride was a convertible Cadillac by the name of Allanté. It mixed American power and engineering with a body designed in Italy. Today we take a look at something with the same sort of principles, but with the additional quirkiness of a British backstory.
And it’s much, much rarer than the Cadillac.
To celebrate the launch of a brand new model, the people at Jaguar massaged one of their longest-lived models into a special edition.
It’s the XJR you’ve never heard of.
Though we wrote about the Sterling brand in a previous QOTD post from earlier this year, we’ve never covered one as a Rare Ride. It’s not often one finds a Sterling for sale these days, as most examples fell into disrepair and disuse by the late 1990s. But B&B commenter FreedMike managed to find a very tidy Sterling for sale at a dealer in Wisconsin, which is near Canada.
Come have a look at the not-quite Honda from Blighty.
Struggling for decades, Marcos Engineering produced very few examples of its flagship GT model. This excellent condition restored example recently made its way up onto the eBay auction block, which presents a good opportunity to take a look at this stylish British sports car.
Details have come to light regarding the return of Land Rover’s long-running Defender model to the North American market. This time around, things will be a little different. After a solid 67-year run (dating back to 1948 as the “Series” models), perhaps some changes were due.
And this time, North America gets to see the new Defender at the same time as the rest of the world.
Back in June, Rare Rides profiled a different blue British beauty in the form of the Aston Martin Lagonda. Down in the comments section, TTAC reader Heino requested coverage of a Hooper-bodied Bentley.
Frankly, I forgot about the request in short order. But it sprang back to mind as soon as I saw the awkward visage of what would become today’s Rare Ride: a Bentley Hooper Empress II. Ready for a history lesson?
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