TVR’s new sports car will be built in Wales

Wales is fast becoming the new home of resurgent British sports car makers. TVR is the latest to confirm it will build its new products there, a month after Aston Martin announced it’s setting up a new factory in the Vale of Glamorgan

TVR will produce its new sports car a weeny bit more north, in the Ebbw Vale, to be precise. And the Welsh government is putting its hand in its pocket to help.

Yup, over the next five years, a reported £30million of Welsh government spending will be channeled TVR’s way, with the hope that a healthy new high-end sports car maker will attract other new businesses, tourists – and therefore jobs – to the area, paying off the investment handsomely.

TVR’s decision to locate to Wales has no doubt been influenced by the possibility of a state of the art new race track being built in the same country of Blaenau Gwent. The so-called Circuit of Wales (it’s not actually an entire lap of the country) is designed to sit on an 830-acre plot of land near to Ebbw Vale.

It will feature the main, MotoGP-hosting circuit, plus smaller tracks for driver training and tech centres for motorsport-related businesses. A bit of a motorsport utopia, really.

Having a brand new track facility on its doorstep would be a major coup for reborn TVR, but the circuit has been delayed by environmental concerns and a decision on green-lighting it is due in autumn 2016. Hedging its bets, TVR is also looking at other using existing buildings as its new base, instead of an all-new facility at the proposed track. 

Wherever it’s eventually settled, the factory itself will hinge around Gordon Murray’s iStream carbon build process to apparently produce stiff, lightweight body structures with pre-fitted wiring looms and piping in a fraction of the time of conventional car production lines.

That, plus the promise of a Cosworth-tuned V8 engine, has already seen 350 deposits slapped down for the new TVR. We get the feeling this is going to be quite an exciting new car, don’t you? Watch this space.