Trident Clipper History

The Clipper's story begins not in Ipswich but in Turin. In 1964 TVR commissioned Italian designer Trevor Fiore (born Trevor Frost) and coachbuilder Carrozzeria Fissore to create an elegant 2+2 fastback for the 1965 Geneva Motor Show. The show car was striking — a long-bonneted, fast-backed coupe riding on a Ford 4.7-litre V8 — but TVR slid into insolvency before it could reach production. William 'Bill' Last, a TVR dealer in East Anglia who had been selling the Blackpool firm's cars, stepped in and bought one of the three prototypes along with the design rights and body moulds.

Last established Trident Cars Ltd and refined the prototype into a production car, fitting it to an Austin-Healey 3000 donor chassis and powering it with the 289 cubic-inch (4.7-litre) Ford V8 — the same engine from a batch of 30 units that TVR had already ordered. The Clipper launched in 1967 at a basic price of £1,923 in kit form, rising to around £3,500 fully built. Performance was genuinely impressive for the era: period tests recorded 0–60 mph in approximately 5.9 seconds and a top speed near 145 mph from around 270 bhp.

Later Clippers switched to the Triumph TR6 chassis and eventually a Chrysler 5.9-litre V8 was evaluated, though only prototype quantities were fitted. Production ground to a halt in 1974 as the oil crisis and recession killed the market for expensive hand-built sports cars; American emissions regulations simultaneously closed the export door that had represented a meaningful share of prospective sales. A brief revival in 1976–1977 added just two further cars before the original company finally closed. Sources vary on the total Clipper build count — figures of between 35 and 39 are most commonly cited, with a handful of cars assembled across different chassis specifications.