A great deal of back ground work had been done by Roel van Es to set up the website for the TR8 Day -namely www.tr8-uk.org and Brian Ridley-Jones who printed off all the invitations. Similarly Val McMillan was instrumental in revising and updating the booklet "Is it a TR8", which was to be the little memento for the day, and advising all the major classic car magazines of the event.
Although not all the replies were positive, initial indications showed that 27 people would be available to show their cars, so I was confident that we would attain the magical 40 cars by 3rd July. However, in this world, few things go to plan and by the week before the National Weekend we had reached 38 cars but then, for various reasons this fell back to 30.
Sunday morning began dry but cloudy, however, before long the sun broke through and the promise of a great day unfolded. By 10.00am the cars began to arrive and the task of marshalling them into position began in earnest. Roel took over as chief marshal and the display began to take shape.
With the wide and varied specifications of cars attending, it was necessary to have a basic plan to show them off to best effect. The provisional total indicated that there would be three Fixed Head Coupes, nine UK spec cars, four experimental cars and fourteen USA spec convertibles plus the TR8 replica Rally car. As there was a large proportion of works cars it was decided that they should have pride of place. To this end the Steve Thomas’s TR8 rally car was positioned at the front with the second row comprising the two factory demonstrators KHP 532V & KHP 533V works car KHP 565V and experimental DH Coupes JVC 842V, KHP573V & PVC 568W. The third row contained the FH Coupes including Ian Tinsey’s Prototype, Sean Turnbull’s X898; John Forshaw’s EFI RHD works car and Keith Cox’s weight distribution car. The fourth row included Californian and Federal spec DH Coupes plus one Canadian convertible. The fifth row contained the nine UK spec convertibles including the pre-production car owned by David Horton with an original, works fitted, Spider interior. A late entry that was slotted in was the ex John Eales car which is believed to be the first TR8 DHC to be built. This gave a total of thirty-one cars.
