Peter Brock on remembering Kas Kastner | Column

It’s never easy losing a good friend. Even more difficult when you know there’s no option. 

Cancer is an immutable enemy. We lost Kas Kastner a few weeks back, and the world as I knew it won’t be quite the same. 

Kas and I became good friends more than 50 years ago, when he was head of Triumph’s Competition Department in America and I was racing Japanese Hino sedans–before sports car racing morphed into the highly professional game it is today.

Losing creates respect. We each had our share and that made us all the more analytical of our respective abilities and appreciative of each other’s special skills. Perhaps that’s why we were able to become friends over several seasons; it wasn’t about the money, but about doing something we loved: building and fielding the best equipment possible under some pretty restrictive regulations.

In 1967, as my deal with Hino waned due to a Toyota takeover of their car division, I looked more closely at Kas’s situation in production car racing. We both realized that Triumph’s survival would require something faster and better-looking to maintain the reputation he’d built for them. We realized that together we could create the answer, but only if his management in England could understand what was needed in the unique, fast-changing American sports car market. 

Our answer was the TR250K–we added the “K” to ensure its origin was clear. Together we created a totally new look for British Leyland’s latest six-cylinder TR250–a fine-looking car in the traditional U.K. sense, but not even close in appeal to the game-changing models the Japanese were planning for America. 

[The Triumph TR250K: The American concept that might have saved the British auto industry]

Kastner’s genius in making production components race-worthy was legendary. By designing a new shape for one of his reworked chassis, we knew we’d have a winning sales combination for America. But how to convince distant U.K. management we had the answer? 

Our solution was to create a running concept, built to SCCA Production car specs, and race it in the 12 Hours of Sebring. As a one-off, it would have to run in the Prototype class, but that didn’t matter as we weren’t aiming for an overall win. Our test would be to race against the production Porsche GTs. Success would demonstrate what might be possible if the TR250K went into production. 

Kas took my concept sketch to the U.K. for approval and, on the way, stopped off in New York to visit the editor of Car and Driver magazine. Leon Mandel took one look and promised a cover story if we could actually build the TR250K and race it at Sebring!

Acceptance of our idea in the U.K. was only lukewarm–it was far “too American” for conservative English taste and suffered from the dreaded “wasn’t invented here” syndrome. 

Four months later, our barely finished prototype was on the Sebring grid. Without even having the luxury of a full day’s test at Riverside, we’d bravely headed for Florida. 

The K-car was faster than anyone had expected and would have easily demonstrated our concept but for a broken mag wheel in the early hours that sidelined our effort. Still, the public response was amazing, even more so weeks later when it made the cover of Car and Driver. 

The response in the U.K. was curious. Management never even acknowledged our Sebring effort, but then it attempted to copy the design for what eventually became the TR7. 

Kas is gone now, but the memories remain. In time those too will fade, but the TR250K will endure as a tangible result of our mutual respect and friendship.

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