http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/2101208/Trevor-Wilkinson.html
Trevor Wilkinson Last updated: 11:41 PM BST 09/06/2008 Motor engineer who founded the TVR sports car firm and offered his distinctive models fully assembled or in kit form.
Trevor Wilkinson: awestruck fansTrevor Wilkinson, who died on Friday aged 85, founded the TVR sports car firm which he named after himself, and which he sold in the 1960s to set up his own engineering company.
Having left school at 14 with no qualifications, he took an engineering apprenticeship and started his own car repair workshop, building his first sports car from the remains of an old prewar Alvis. Later he assembled another from scratch, using springs salvaged from a dodgem ride at a fairground, where he had taken a job repairing machinery to support his fledgling car business.
Out of the blue, in 1956, an American racing enthusiast asked Wilkinson to produce a special chassis for sports car racing in the United States.
Wilkinson's prototype led the following year to the TVR Grantura, his first commercial car, which he sold either fully assembled or in kit form. The fact that it used parts cannibalised from other cars meant it was cheaper than other sports cars, while its smooth, low nose and one-piece forward-hinged bonnet set the pattern for future TVR marques.
By the summer of 1960 Wilkinson had sold his 100th car, but the company was dogged by financial problems and disagreements with his fellow directors, and he sold it two years later.
Trevor Wilkinson was born in Blackpool on May 14 1923 and educated locally, but left school at the age of 14 to begin an engineering apprenticeship at a local garage. In 1946, at the age of 23, he bought a wheelwright's business in Beverly Grove, Blackpool, renaming it Trevcar Motors the following year and converting it for the purposes of selling and repairing cars and light engineering.
In 1947 he built his first car, a special two-seater body on an Alvis Firebird chassis for himself. When he launched TVR Engineering – derived from three consonants in his first name – Wilkinson was joined by Jack Pickard, the pair intending to build cars to their own designs.
The first made its appearance in 1949: an alloy two-seater body on a multi-tubular steel chassis with the springs in the front suspension, famously derived from the supports of the bumper of a fairground car, it sold for £325.
The second one, still in existence and in immaculate condition, is owned by a TVR enthusiast in Yorkshire.
Wilkinson then designed what was to become the traditional underpinnings of multi-tubular backbone chassis.
The first production TVR was the Mark I, later named Grantura, with a fibreglass body of a design which endured, in modified form, until the M-type was replaced by the angular wedge design Tasmin in 1980.
Trevor Wilkinson left the company in April 1962, just before TVR's first, unsuccessful, entry into the Le Mans 24-hour race. He went on to set up his own engineering business with Jack Pickard, specialising in fibreglass.
Late in life Wilkinson moved to Minorca, spending as much time as possible on his small yacht. A quiet, reserved man, he seemed unaware of the awe in which he was held by TVR enthusiasts. He lived to see TVRs finish at Le Mans and last year's anniversary celebrations marking TVR's foundation.
Trevor Wilkinson's wife predeceased him.
