Peter R. Wheeler, the former owner of the quirky sports-car maker TVR and a maverick of Britain’s car industry, died June 11 in England. He was 65. His death, after a struggle with cancer, was confirmed by Ben Samuelson, a friend of Wheeler’s family and a former TVR employee.
In 1981, when Wheeler bought TVR, a maker of fast and relatively inexpensive sports cars with a passionate fan club, the only thing that linked him with TVR was that he drove one.
Wheeler, a chemical engineer from Sheffield, England, with no experience in the car industry who had made his money supplying specialized equipment to the North Sea oil industry, started designing and overseeing the production of several car models, including the Tuscan and the Chimaera, which were known for their finely tuned engines and extra-light bodywork.
The company then operated from a property in a residential area of Blackpool. Wheeler’s aim was to shed the image of “plastic cars from Blackpool” and take on the likes of Porsche and Ferrari by improving his vehicles’ engineering and using his keen intuition about the preferences of sports-car buyers.
TVR was founded in the late 1940s by Trevor Wilkinson, who used three letters from his own first name for the company’s moniker. Though such rivals as Aston Martin were bought by larger carmakers, TVR survived as the last independent British carmaker that largely made its own components.
But the business never really flourished until Wheeler took over, building about 40 cars a week by 1998 and making an annual profit of about $4.3 million.
Samuelson, who worked at TVR for 11 years, until 2004, described Wheeler as “one of the last great innovators and mavericks of the British car industry.”
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As a fitting tribute to the longevity of the publication, the cover image from the April 1959 edition will once again feature on the front of the April 2009 issue.
