Tom Richardson Sr.’s 1963 Triumph TR4 wasn’t quite new when he bought it from Jack Wagner. According to his son, Tommy, now 54, his dad sold the MGTC and bought the Triumph. Tommy’s mother drove a 1959 Chevy station wagon, so the TR4 became Tom Sr.’s daily driver in the North Carolina mountains for several years.
“He made a little jumpseat for me and my sister,” Tommy says, “and he installed a luggage rack. The whole family would go on trips to places like VIR (Virginia International Raceway), and the Chimney Rock Hillclimb. My father always read Road & Track magazine and followed Formula One in the 1960s. As a kid, he always bought me the newest Matchbox Grand Prix cars.”
Eventually, though, negotiating the heavy winter snows in the car became a real chore, so he sold the Triumph in 1971 to Bob Thompson and bought a first-generation 4x4 Ford Bronco.
“That Triumph wasn’t worth a crap in the snow,” says Tommy Jr.
Thompson used the TR4 sparingly, but parked it in 1973 when he went into the military, fully expecting to come home again to enjoy the peppy little sports car on western North Carolina’s mountain roads. “He removed the wheels and put them in the basement of his mother’s house, and drained all the fluids,” Tommy says. “He did a meticulous job of storing the car.”
The Richardson’s TR4 “back in the day.” This is the car that brought the family to races at Virginia International Raceway and hillclimbs at Chimney Rock. Tom Richardson sold the car to a local enthusiast in 1971. T. O. RICHARDSON
But after his tour of duty, Thompson instead moved to Alaska and left the Triumph to languish in a shed in his mother’s backyard for decades.
Tommy Richardson, meanwhile, just assumed the Triumph had been in Alaska with Thompson all these years, but by accident, he discovered that his father’s old sports car was still in North Carolina, where it had sat since 1973.
“I decided to buy it in 1999 and surprise my dad for his 67th birthday,” Tommy says. “The original paint compounded out like new, and once I added fluids, the car started right up. As it was sitting there running, a big old snake stuck his head out from the heater vent. If I had been driving the car, I would have jumped out.”
All it needed was fluids and some lubrication. T. O. RICHARDSON
Tommy used ether to chase the black snake from its long-time habitat before he presented his father with the car. “The leather seats deteriorated when you touched them, and the carpets were rotted, but otherwise, it was like a time capsule,” Tommy says. “We had a little birthday party and I told him, ‘Dad, your birthday present is downstairs.’ It looked so good—he just loved it.”
Unfortunately, Tom Richardson passed away not long afterward in 2008, and he never had a chance to again enjoy his pride-and-joy on the road. His son covered the car up in the garage, left his father’s tools where they were, and turned out the light.
“It’s sitting in a building and I haven’t touched it since he passed,” Tommy says.
When the car was discovered in 1999, it was cleaned up by his children and presented as a surprise to Tom Richardson for his 67th birthday. T. O. RICHARDSON