Should' ave Bought A Fizz Bomb!

After putting in many hours of work restoring this 1973 Triumph Stag, the owner wasn’t too pleased when a spotty youth wearing a hoodie suggested he should have bought a ‘Fizz Bomb’ instead. It was further explained in a Scouse accent that a Fizz Bomb referred to Ford’s Fiesta, something ‘well better’ than an old car like a Stag!

- Dave Bowers

Comparing this Stag rather negatively with a Ford Fiesta is probably something which the Triumph’s owner, Geoff Frackelton, could have endorsed when work on the Stag was not going well. However, rather than calling it a day and taking the extreme action of scrapping the car, he took the opposite approach and ploughed on to achieve a beautiful looking car that also contained certain technical improvements.

Describing why he always wanted a Stag and how he took on a 15year battle to return his car back on the road, Geoff said: ‘When I was a schoolboy, a local hairdresser drove a blue Stag for many years. It was never a ‘hairdresser’s car’ in my estimation, I always thought it was a lovely design at the top of Triumph’s range. My first car was a Dolomite 1850, and my Stag was bought some years later in 1990. It had 12 months MoT, but it was rough – the sills were on their way out and had been bodged, the door bottoms had gone, and sometime later on I realised the suspension mounts were shot. Oh, and the crankshaft was knocking.

‘Nothing was right, but I did a bit of welding to get the car through its next MoT and ran it until a driveshaft collapsed in Wales in 1992. Marriage, buying a house and bringing up two children then meant the Stag was left rusting away in our garage. So later on, I asked my wife Helen what we should do. It was agreed I should restore the car, so I started picking away doing repairs, with welding and bodywork preparation first of all.’