40 YEARS ON....

Graham Robson reflects on the remarkable career of Triumph’s Small Car (SC) engine, a unit that went out of production nearly four decades ago but whose legacy lives on in so many of the cars we know and love.

When Standard introduced the new Standard Eight in 1953, the car’s engineering was new from end to end – new shell, new suspension, new transmission, and a brand new engine. At the time it was by far the largest capital investment the company had ever made, so the planners hoped every major item in the running gear could run for years and years.

Which it did, but surely noone could have expected to see the engine (coded SC for Small Car) still in production more than 25 years later. It sold strongly and successfully to the end, for the last batch of all were not manufactured until the summer of 1980 when the final Spitfires, Dolomite 1300s and Dolomite 1500s were being assembled at Canley. In all that time, well over 1.7 million complete engines were built, and had been fitted to no fewer than 15 major series-production cars.

If I am not careful this survey could become a listing of statistics, which I promise will not happen, so let me merely summarise by noting that SCs were built in four different sizes, that their range of power outputs stretched from 26bhp (1953 Standard Eight) to 117bhp (prototype 1.3-litre Works rally engines of 1965), and that they were also fitted to such extreme machines as the four-wheel-drive Pony (which was eventually built in Israel) and the original Standard Atlas van of the late 1950s. Not only that, but nearly 74,000 units were supplied to Abingdon in the 1970s to help keep the MG Midget alive.

The origins of the SC really date from 1950, when Standard-Triumph’s dictatorial CEO, Sir John Black, concluded that the last of the Standard sidevalve engines (the 1247cc unit which had been launched in the 1930s and was still powering the Triumph Mayflower) must soon be pensioned off. Not only that, but he also wanted to see an all-new small Standard put on sale so that he could fight Austin and Morris (soon to merge and become BMC) head-to-head in the booming British and Empire markets.