TVR Gets New Owners

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In a chilly airplane hangar in Polk City, Florida, the official coming-out party for the new TVR company took place in early March, hosted by new owners Jean-Michel Santacreu, an amateur racing driver and head of an Orlando convention and party planning company, and Adam Burdette, owner of Evolution Imports, which markets Japanese-domestic-market cars in the United States for The Fast and the Furious crowd.

Santacreu and Burdette looked a little like the dog that has spent years chasing a car and finally catches one: Now what?

The two young businessmen are now the owners of a legendary British sports-car company that will no longer be based in Britain. They plan to import one model of the TVR to America in 2008, the Sagaris, to be sold here through a 45-dealer network. Annual production will be 5000 cars.

The U.S. Sagaris will be powered by a 4.0-liter, 400-hp, inline-six-cylinder Speed Six engine sourced from Ricardo, the British firm. The final assembly will be done by Bertone in Italy. Bodies will be produced in England, and rumors say a South African source was considered. Price: $120,000.

This is just the latest in a series of bizarre twists involving TVR, the most recent coming under the ownership of mercurial Russian banking tycoon Nikolai Smolenski, who, at age 24, bought TVR in July 2004.

Last year, Smolenski, who now lives in Vienna, Austria, sent TVR into receivership, where multiple parties—one of them backed by sports-car fan and rock legend Rick Wakeman of the group Yes—bid on the company. In the end, the winner of the December 2006 auction was—surprise—Smolenski. Critics suggest that it was a way for Smolenski to discharge the company’s debts and then resell the company.

Enter Santacreu and Burdette, who inquired into a possible U.S. TVR distributorship about a year ago. On Feb. 25, Santacreu and Burdette became owners of TVR. Smolenski is gone.

This will not be TVR’s first shot at the U.S. market, but it may be its best. Founded in 1947 by Trevor Wilkinson (“TVR” is a contraction of Wilkinson’s first name), the company began building limited-edition sports cars in 1949. The cars were well regarded in Europe, where they won many races, but were essentially unknown in the States, except for in the 1980s, when the V6-powered TVR Tasmin 280i was imported.

TVR’s website (www.tvr.co.uk) lists three models—the Sagaris, the Tuscan S and the Tuscan S convertible—as well as the upcoming 600-hp Typhoon. The new owners plan to concentrate on the Sagaris and would like to build a racing series around the car.

All of which brings us back to the question: Is TVR still a British car? I say it is. After all, the MG SV was British, even if it was assembled in Italy with American Ford engines.