The Triumph Stag: History, Design and Variants

A show special that Triumph could not let go

In 1965 Giovanni Michelotti asked Triumph's Director of Engineering, Harry Webster, for a Triumph 2000 saloon to turn into a show car. Webster agreed on one condition: if Triumph liked what came back, it got first refusal.

What came back was a convertible on a shortened 2000 floorpan, and Webster liked it enough that Triumph took it home to Coventry in 1966 and began developing it for production. The car reached the market in June 1970.

It kept its working title. "Stag" was the internal development code name, and it is the only Triumph ever to carry its code name onto the badge. A small detail, but a telling one about how quickly the project stopped being a favour and started being a car.

What Triumph was aiming at

The Stag was built to sit above the TR range and to take on the Mercedes-Benz SL: a four-seat convertible grand tourer rather than a sports car, with a T-bar roll hoop that is now the most recognisable thing about it. Triumph wanted 12,000 cars a year.

That target is the number to hold on to, because almost everything that followed is measured against it.

The engine, and the thing almost everyone gets backwards

The Triumph V8 is a 90-degree, 2,997 cc unit with a single overhead camshaft per bank, a cast-iron block and aluminium heads, running 8.8:1 on twin Zenith-Stromberg 175 CDSE carburettors, for 145 bhp at 5,500 rpm and 170 lb ft at 3,500.

Under Spen King, from 1968, it grew from a planned 2.5 litres to 3.0, and it did so by increasing the bore, not the stroke, which is why it ended up unusually oversquare at 86 mm by 64.5 mm. The troublesome mechanical fuel injection was dropped along the way in favour of carburettors, largely with the American market in mind.

Now the correction. You will be told, confidently and often, that the Stag V8 is two Dolomite engines welded together. It is the other way round. The V8 came first in the design lineage; the later Dolomite and TR7 slant-fours are effectively half of it: the left bank. Anyone selling you a Stag on the strength of the Dolomite story has the history reversed.

Mk1 and Mk2 are not Triumph's words

Both terms were coined by enthusiasts after production ended. Triumph never used them, and the car changed relatively little across its run. The differences are trim and cosmetic rather than mechanical.

They remain useful shorthand, because the commission-number ranges are real and the visual tells are consistent: twin coach lines, a black and later body-colour rear panel, GKN alloy wheels, clearer gauges, a slightly smaller wheel. Just don't mistake a nickname for a factory designation, particularly when it appears in an advertisement.

How many were built, and how many are left

Approximately 25,939 cars, 1970 to 1977. Of those, 17,819 were UK-market and around 6,780 were exported, but only about 2,871 reached the United States, against a target of 12,000 cars a year.

That shortfall is the whole ending. America largely rejected the Stag on its reliability reputation, the numbers never came close, and production stopped in 1977 with no direct successor. Triumph did not replace it because Triumph had concluded there was nothing to replace.

8,369 remain on the UK register today. For a car that was supposed to have failed, that is a great many survivors, and it is the reason this archive exists.