Meanwhile, over at the Erin stand, we take a look at their range as it would have appeared in 1960…
The early days of the Erin Motor Company were very experimental. With quite literally no experience in making production vehicles, they made their first attempt in 1957 with the Liama, a car that was essentially a detuned prototype racer. A few years later, and they had hired a small team to develop the Erin range (just 6 people, including CEO Dominic Erin), who had begun two lines of sports cars, with a mid-range model called the Tegra and a top-of-the-end model called the Tierza.
Both were based off of the same chassis, originally an Erin Motorsport SP3-8. In practice, this sounds great, though Erin still hadn’t quite got past the whole “road car” and “not a race car” thing…
#1959 Erin Tegra
Erin’s idea of a mid-range sports car was an interior with some features and a smaller engine than their race-cars. Powered by a 2.5l V8 which produced 153 hp, the Tegra was good with performance, capable of 0-60 in 8.6 seconds and a top speed of 121 mph. It also marked the first Erin to come with a folding cloth roof!
Driving it, of course, was manic. The hard race suspension combined with with the racing-derived gearbox made it slippy and loose, though not as mad as it’s bigger brother…
#1957 Erin Tierza
This right here is one of the earliest examples of a true road-going racer. Barely any interior, slightly less power than its race car sibling and a complete lack of road-tuning. You did get a fibreglass roof to allow you to use it in the rain if you so wished, but aside from that, this was a car that would kill you if you let it.
Powered by a 3.2l V8 producing some 214 hp, the Tierza could do 0-60 in 7.4 seconds and top out at 135 mph. What really mattered though was how it behaved in the run up to that speed though; it would slide, understeer, oversteer and wheelspin all over the place, making it a lot of fun when you could control it but pretty much unusable the rest of the time.
Despite all these very clear flaws, enough of these cars sold to keep the Erin Motor Company going in the early days. A total of 166 Tierza’s and 98 Tegra’s were built at the small production facility in Nottingham, UK. Couple with the money being brought in by Erin Motorsport, and in 1961, they made their big break; the Merna and Lagana launched that year, and so began Erin’s rise to prominence.
These cars were never forgotten though; they highlighted the strong connection between motorsport and road vehicles which continues to be expressed to this day with the continued funding of and close relation to Erin[color=turquoise]Sport[/color] that the main company has.
