1973 Triumph Stag - "The Worst Engine Ever Made"

Here are two of the fewer than 3,000 Triumph Stags imported to the US. I've never seen one before, and with good reason: the Stag is considered by many to be the least reliable car of all time.

 












 
















Triumph spent more than five years engineering the Stag's new V-8 engine before its introduction in 1970. Five years developing the worst engine ever made. From Wikipedia:

"The Stag rapidly acquired a reputation for mechanical unreliability, usually in the form of overheating. These problems arose from a variety of causes. 

First, the late changes to the engine gave rise to design features that were questionable from an engineering perspective. For example, the water pump was set higher on the engine than is usual. If the engine became hot in traffic, and coolant escaped from the cooling system via the expansion bottle, the reduced volume of fluid left when the engine cooled down again fell below the level of the pump, which would eventually fail as a result. Water pump failures sometimes occurred due to poorly-hardened drive gears, which wore out prematurely and stopped the water pump.

A second cause of engine trouble was the lack of attention to corrosion inhibitor in the coolant. The block was made from iron and the heads from aluminium, a combination that required the use of corrosion-inhibiting antifreeze all year round. This point was not widely appreciated by owners or by the dealer network supporting them. Consequently engines were affected by electrolytic corrosion and white alloy oxide sludge collected in radiator cores, reducing radiator efficiency and causing overheating. The result was head gasket failure due to cylinder head heat distortion, a very expensive repair. Owners would usually get their repaired cars back with the radiator still clogged, leading to repeat failures.

A third cause of trouble was the engine's use of long, simplex roller link chains, which would first stretch and then often fail inside fewer than 25,000 miles (40,200 km), resulting in expensive damage. Even before failing, a stretched timing chain would skip links and cause valves to lift and fall in the wrong sequence, so that valves hit pistons and damaged both. This fault may have been worsened by poor quality chains.
 
Another problem with the cylinder heads was said to be the arrangement of cylinder head fixing studs, half of which were vertical and the other half at an angle. Anecdotally, this arrangement was used to reduce production costs, as the cylinder head mounting studs and bolt were all accessible with the rocker covers fitted. This allowed the factory to assemble the cylinder head completely before fitting to the engine. The same arrangement worked well enough on the 4-cylinder engines, but in the V8 the angled and vertical studs, when heated and cooled, expanded and contracted in different directions sufficiently to give rise to sideways forces that caused warping of the engine block.

Finally, although pre-production engines cast by an outside foundry performed well, those fitted to production cars were made inhouse by a plant troubled with industrial unrest and inadequate quality control. Engines are still being discovered with casting sand inside, blocking the coolant passages and causing overheating."

Observations:
* The orange car was last registered in Washington in 1987. If someone managed to keep this car running more than 10 years, that person is a genius.
* The attempt at body work is adorable - sort of like buying a new tie for someone in an irreversible coma.
* These cars have removable hardtops.
* I do like the stag emblem on the grill.

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