Cars Built on the Triumph TR3

Michelotti drew the Italia, Vignale built it, and Standard-Triumph's Italian distributor, Salvatore Ruffino, sold it. Krause, in his history of Triumph's sports and racing cars, gives the coupé's availability as 1959 to 1962; he writes that its engine bay was made big enough for the twin-cam engine of the works racing cars, and that a four-cylinder car went to Coventry for evaluation in 1958. The car took the TR3A's chassis and running gear, and in its last year some of the TR3B's; Krause describes the chassis both as the unmodified TR3A and TR3B frame and as a modified TR3-type one. Brian Ridley-Jones, writing for the TR Drivers Club, calls it a car that "used the entire TR3 chassis and drivetrain, with some small modifications".

Ridley-Jones adds detail that no other source read gives. About 1,000 were planned, he writes, but Standard-Triumph's difficulties in 1960 and the coming of the TR4 cut production short; the cars were built at Vignale on a line that Ruffino owned; their engine numbers carried an extra "I"; they had a section of their own in the TR3's production specification book; and the production cars were given a front anti-roll bar, stiffer dampers (shock absorbers) and a seventh leaf in each rear spring to cure their instability. A dealer in Massachusetts imported them into the United States as the "Italia 2000".

How many were made is not settled. Over 300 were sold, according to the TR Drivers Club; Dwinger's TR3A and TR3B figures include them. Krause is in two minds: he puts the number built close to the club's, yet also writes:

Morgan's Plus Four used the TR2's engine by 1955, when it cost the same as an MGA, and Motor Sport listed it the next year as "Vanguard TR3-engined". Front disc brakes were available on it in 1959 and standard by 1960. Morgans with Triumph engines raced at Sebring through the TR3's years. How the Plus Four compared with the TR3 on price is on Rivals.⁠source 3​source 6​source 7​source 8​source 9​source 10

The Peerless GT was an English GT built on the Slough Trading Estate from 1957, to a design by Bernie Rodger. It had the TR3's engine, gearbox and front suspension, a de Dion rear axle on half-elliptic springs, a space frame and a glass-fibre body. Its makers first showed it in Paris, Motor Sport reported, because they could not show it in London:

By the London Motor Show of 1959 the car had made what Motor Sport called "a trouble free run at Le Mans". The Warwick GT followed it, the Vintage Triumph Register records.⁠source 4​source 7​source 11

Bill Devin made glass-fibre bodies that were, in the TR Drivers Club's account by Mike Napoli, "grafted onto various chassis including … the Triumph TR2/3 (the F type Devin)". Napoli's own car began as a TR3 of 1957 that had raced in South Africa. No source read gives how many TR-based Devins were built.⁠source 2

The Swallow Doretti of 1954–55 came before the TR3: a two-seater with the TR2's engine and gearbox in a tubular frame, built by the Swallow Coachbuilding Company at Walsall. Only about 275 to 300 were made, the TR Drivers Club records.⁠source 2

The TR3's chief part on film is in Shell's Coupe des Alpes, about the 1958 Alpine Rally, on which Keith Ballisat won his Coupe in a TR3. Motor Sport reviewed it in March 1959:

In America Standard-Triumph made a film of its own, Operation Europe, about the owners' rallies on the Continent, which ran 46 minutes and was cut for the television series Compass. TR3s were given away as prizes on CBS's Dotto, NBC's Truth or Consequences and Treasure Hunt, and on Garroway's Today, in 1958; and Esquire wrote up the owners' rallies as "The Great European Drive-Away" in February 1959. And on the American International Rally of 1959, one of Standard-Triumph's team TR3s was driven by Walter Cronkite.⁠source 12​source 13​source 14​source 15​source 16​source 17