TRIUMPH wasn’t exactly flush with cash in the 1960s – and it certainly couldn’t go giving its cars away.

But when Triumph’s favourite go-to Italian designer asked if he could have a freebie saloon to use as the basis for a sporty one-off motor show concept the company didn’t hesitate. A Triumph 2000 was put on the next boat for Italy with chief designer Harry Webster’s compliments.

Giovanni Michelotti thought the new Triumph 2000 would make an excellent donor vehicle for his next flight of fancy, but when he showed off his ideas to the Triumph management they had the foresight to snap up the concept for themselves.

Michelotti must have had mixed feelings about this turn of events. He was probably disappointed that the planned soft-top grand tourer would miss the 1965 Turin Show, but happy to have banked yet another design job from his British clients.

Although Michelotti had done the donkey work in just a few months – his concept was recognisably the car that would become the Triumph Stag – the finished production car would not see the light of day until 1970, the victim of internal politics and a chronic cash shortage.

Nevertheless, Triumph’s management were nothing if not ambitious.

Despite having a serviceable 2.5-litre inline six engine which could have slotted into the forthcoming Stag, the company decided to create its own V8 instead. This would be created by combining two examples of the Triumph slant-four engine destined for the company’s smaller family saloon (the 1500/Dolomite/Toledo).

The V8 was thought essential if the Stag were to sell in the United States but the 2.5-litre six was readily available so the company went ahead with a twin prong approach – the six cylinder would be the launch engine and the V8 would be dropped into the car when it was ready (or not, as the case may be).

Michelotti soft-top design looked great, but it had all the structural integrity of a wet fag packet so Triumph’s engineers added the Stag’s iconic roll-over T-bar hoop to stiffen the whole thing up.

Things were going well but in 1967 politics took a hand when Triumph became part of British Leyland.

This should have been a heaven-sent opportunity to use the Rover V8 in the Stag but Triumph’s management dogged pressed ahead with their own V8 project. Spen King, the ex-Rover man who found himself in charge after the merger, was told the Rover unit wouldn’t fit and decided not to insist because strong demand for the Rover V8 from other models meant there wasn’t the spare capacity to meet Stag demand anyway. King also scrapped the inline six-cylinder plan. With the benefit of hindsight, these decisions would prove disastrous.

All that was to come and in June 1970 the motoring world was agog with the new Stag.

The 3.0-litre V8 compared favourably with the Rover 3.5 V8 on paper and gave the Stag the kind of long-legged appeal it needed.

Unfortunately, it also suffered from appalling reliability. Wherever you looked on the engine – from the cylinder head to the water pump and even the crankshaft – there was a problem. Owners who didn’t adhere rigidly to the servicing schedule (which required the expensive replacement of the timing chain every 25,000 miles) were courting catastrophe.

Triumph built just over 25,000 Stags and the majority suffered from a spectacular engine problem at one time or another. One of my distant relatives owned a Stag and I can still vividly recall it limping onto our drive with clouds of steam billowing from beneath the shapely bonnet on a number of occasions.

Sadly, as BL entered the 1970s and lurched from one crisis to another, there simply wasn’t any money to put right the problems.

Fortunately for lovers of good-looking British sports cars enough motorists recognised the Stag’s potential to keep the legend alive. Today, a Stag is a genuine classic: a beautiful grand tourer guaranteed to turn heads wherever it goes.

This was one British car that enjoyed a happy ending – albeit nearly four decades after it went out of production.