Bare metal usually lives under shop lights, where the welds are clean and the sanding marks are honest, or under a softbox in a photo studio. But seeing that same kind of unfinished fabrication racing between cones at LS Fest West is a little different.

That’s partly what caught our eye the first time we saw this 1974 Triumph TR6 from Old Anvil Speed Shop slide backward through the timing lights on the autocross.

It has all the right British roadster lines but with just enough wrongness. The nose is longer. The bumpers are gone. The grille is hand-built. It sits on pro-touring wheels. And sticking through the hood are two carburetors that aren’t actually carburetors.

Before this car was an LS-powered autocross toy, it was supposed to be something even stranger. Old Anvil originally took on the TR6 as a partially started project for a pair of friends. One of them, Charlie, had big plans for the car. The original idea called for a Jaguar V12, six Weber carburetors, and shiny black paint.

“It’s a crazy story of why would you do a Triumph like that?” said Paul Bosserman, president of Old Anvil Speed Shop. “But that’s how weird things evolve, I guess.”

The project has a personal side, too. Charlie passed away before the car was finished, and the other owner, James, eventually decided he couldn’t keep going with it. The car reminded him too much of his friend. Old Anvil bought it, tried to sell it for a while, and then LS Fest West regular Ray Bayly came along.

Ray and his sons have been bringing cars to LS Fest for a while now, including Ray’s El Camino, Tyler’s LT1-powered 1967 Buick, and Trevor behind the wheel of Ray’s C7 Corvette. When Ray saw the Triumph come up for sale, it clicked.

“I really love cars that are different, that you don’t see on every car show and every corner,” Ray said. “And so when I saw it, I told myself, ‘I got to have that car.’”

Ray is also an LS/LT guy, so the Jaguar V12 was never really part of his plan.

“Jaguar motors just aren’t known for their reliability,” Ray said. “And I’m an LS/LT guy, so I already knew I had to put an LS in it.”

Body Stretch

By the time Ray got involved, the body had already been pushed pretty far in that original V12 direction. Old Anvil stretched the TR6 six inches through the cowl and front fenders, adding length ahead of the passenger compartment to make room for the longer Jaguar engine. The cowl grew with it, creating a bigger pedal-box area.

Old Anvil ditched the original windshield, removed the door glass, welded in the area where the convertible top once lived, changed the taillights to those from a Corvair, got rid of the bumpers, built the front rally-light bar, and fabricated the grille. Even the lower front section was flared to help package the new DeWitts radiator and brushless SPAL fans. The changes are everywhere, but they still read as one shape.

Suspension Mods

Underneath, the TR6’s footprint is just as considered. The rear suspension is a Heidts IRS, while the front is a Mustang II-style setup with coilovers. Old Anvil shortened the control arms and used the offset of the three-piece Avant Garde F120 wheels to pull everything inboard, avoiding a full widebody treatment right away. That kept the body narrow, kept the stance right, and gave the car the almost-zero scrub radius Paul wanted. With the tire and steering axis working together, the manual steering is light enough that Paul said you can sit still and turn the wheel with ease.

Paul does not come at that stuff casually. Years ago, he worked on a Busch Grand National Series team running former Dale Earnhardt Jr. cars, and suspension knowledge runs deep in his family. His brother, Todd Bosserman, and cousin, Brian Weitzel, are active in NASCAR Cup Series suspension.

The goal was not to make the Triumph look like another modern swap car, though. “I wanted to go old school on this car,” Ray said. “I don’t want it to look like everybody’s car. I want to do something different with the exhaust. I want to do something different with the EFI.”

That thinking carried straight into the intake setup.

“My goal was to make the LS look old school with dual carbs,” Ray said.

Paul was already thinking along the same lines, as he’d done this setup on a nice Chevy II build. Utilizing a low-profile LS intake with a dual-carb lid, the two carburetors feature no fuel and instead act like throttle bodies, controlling airflow only. The hood had already been cut for the six Weber carburetors planned for the Jaguar V12, and Paul realized the Holley EFI setup would fill the opening perfectly.

Old Anvil Speed Shop is currently in development to make this arrangement a purchasable kit using Holley components.

THE DRIVETRAIN

Since the TR6 had already been cut and packaged around the Jaguar V12, the LS didn’t require a total reset. Paul said they mainly changed the engine mounts and barely touched the transmission location. Ray supplied the drivetrain, and the existing exhaust path made the rest of the packaging less dramatic than it probably should have been.

The engine is an LS-based 402 stroker with LS3 heads, a Scat forged bottom end, 4-inch stroke forged crank, forged H-beam rods, and forged pistons. Behind it is a 4L80E with a stock converter, controlled by a Holley Terminator X Max.

Ray admits that the engine was more of a get-it-to-LS-Fest solution than the final answer. He had it available, the car needed to make the event, and the timeline was not exactly gentle. The plan is to build a destroked 6.0-liter.

“We had some power issues putting it to the ground, and the car just kind of wants to violently go wherever it wants to go,” Ray said.

The goal is to pull some torque out of the bottom end and make the car easier to put down on the course. The 4L80E may not be permanent either. Ray says the car will likely move to a TKX five-speed as it gets closer to its final autocross setup.

The intake, valve covers, and wheels are finished in Burnt Bronze Cerakote, with the coils tucked inside the transmission tunnel. The air cleaner is another one of those Old Anvil details that makes more sense the longer you look at it. Paul said it was built from aluminum, held together with 83 aircraft rivets, and uses a Corvette-style filter element that slides in from the back.

Trevor, Ray’s youngest son, handled the forward section of the exhaust. He cut and flipped a set of Flowtech headers to meet the 2.5-inch exhaust Old Anvil had already built toward the rear. The forward-facing exhaust originally exited in front of the tires, which looked right on the car, but the larger radiator created a packaging issue that the team is already reworking. The system also has cutouts that can route exhaust through the rear section when the car needs to be quieter for street use.

THE SHAKEDOWN AT LS FEST WEST

LS Fest West, though, was not the finished version of the car. It was the first real test. Actually, even “first test” may be generous.

“The day before we left, mind you, the car had never been on the road prior to that, never been tested, never anything,” Ray said. “Basically, we just fired it up, loaded it on the trailer, and jammed to Vegas.”

As if the Triumph was not already enough of a conversation piece, Ray’s El Camino towed it nearly 300 miles home from LS Fest without issue.

Since Ray was already running the El Camino in Grand Champion, Paul handled most of the driving in the Triumph. Ray wanted Paul to have time in it since Old Anvil had built the chassis and body, and the event became a working shakedown for both sides of the build.

“The tires are super old,” Paul said. “They’re seven years old and hard as a rock. So it was like driving on banana peels, but it allowed me to really see what the car was doing.”

That showed up quickly. The TR6 had too much rear brake at first, which sent the car around when Paul got on the brakes at the end of an autocross run. They adjusted the brake bias, worked through a throttle and idle-air-control issue with help from Harrison Alford at Holley, and kept chipping away at it all weekend.

Ray eventually jumped in for the final 3S Challenge run. He made a clean pass in the left lane, then pushed harder in the right lane. The car accelerated hard, made the first right cleanly, and then started breaking loose around 50 mph when he got back into the throttle.

The spin was not exactly shocking. At roughly 2,500 pounds, with a torquey 402-inch LS and old tires, the Triumph is not hurting for power.

“And just like all weekend, we just kept doing things, and it was getting better and better,” Paul said. “So I think it’ll be super competitive once we get some sticky tires on it.”

For now, the Triumph is being returned to development. LS Fest West was the shakedown, not the finish line.

FUTURE PLANS

The plan is to make it a real autocross car first, then worry about making it pretty. That means more tire, more brake and suspension work, a possible TKX five-speed swap, and eventually a destroked LS combination that should make the car less violent off the corner.

The body is part of that next step, too. Paul wants to keep the original flare shape in the conversation and simply make it bigger. Ray is thinking about a wider treatment along the body lines. Either way, the goal is not to lose the Triumph underneath the changes.

“Yeah, that’s just stock fenders,” Paul said of the current flare shape. “They were already kind of flared that way. That’s why I’d like to just bring them out and make them bigger.”

The target is somewhere around a 275- or 295-wide tire, and Ray says the current 18x8.5-inch Avant Garde Wheels F120s will likely be re-hooped to around 10 or 10.5 inches wide. Since they are three-piece wheels, the team can adjust the hoops, work with the backspacing, and sneak more tire under the car without throwing away the whole look.

“It’s the beauty of a three-piece,” Paul said.

There are other changes on the list, too. Ray mentions a completed windshield frame, a canvas bikini top, a front splitter, a rear spoiler, a possible diffuser, and flat panels under the car. The future engine, transmission, and suspension pieces are also likely to get the same Burnt Bronze Cerakote treatment. Eventually, the interior and paint will come. But not yet.

The priority is making the car work.

“We really want to make it not only cool, but it’s got to perform,” Ray said. “That’s the ultimate goal, to be out there and be competitive and maybe have a winning car.”

That may be the best part of the whole thing. This TR6 didn’t show up finished, painted, sorted, and wrapped in a neat little story. It showed up in bare metal, on old tires, with a fresh LS swap and a list of things to fix.

And still took us by surprise.