I Want That One...

Having spent his childhood being driven around in this Triumph, there was never any other car that Mick Armstrong was going to restore. Now that it has been converted back from carbs to fuel injection, he is on the finishing straight – after 28 years!

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This car is a Wedgwood Blue 2.5PI, built 1971 and then shipped to Cavendish Motors in Chesterfield who sold it in 1972. I don’t know anything about the first owner or its early years, but within three years it had become our family’s car. My father worked as a mechanic at our local garage, Kinsall Green Garage in Tamworth, and they had a car sales pitch as well as doing the usual repairs. One day dad was asked to pick up a car they’d bought from the auctions, and I went along with him.

This was in 1975, I was seven at the time and this very car is the one we went to collect. The garage had bought a couple of big Triumphs – they didn’t specialise in the model, but they were obviously selling well at the time! My dad loved this car right away, and said on the journey back to the garage: ‘I’m going to buy this.’ We did already have a 2000, but this car just did it for him. I think it was the colour as much as anything. It went down well at home too, because mum loved it. She still does, though sadly dad passed away in 2016.

So this became our family car and I grew up being driven around in it. My dad’s family lived down in Devon, so we would go down there regularly from our home in Tamworth. We’d go out for Sunday afternoon drives too, for a picnic or to somewhere of interest as people did back then, so as you can imagine it holds a lot of fond family memories for me, and for my mum and my sister Pam.