Let’s Celebrate St.Patrick’s Day By Talking About An Irish Car, The TMC Costin

It’s the day where much of the world likes to take our positive views and affection for the people of Ireland and use that as a fantastic excuse to get drunk and wear green, and you know what? Good. Why not? Life is short and the Irish have a beautiful country, great accents, the gave us James Joyce whom we can lie about having read, and their coffee is lots more exciting than normal coffee. So let’s talk about a car from Ireland!

There really aren’t that many really-Irish cars to talk about here. And by really Irish, I mean from Irish companies, not cars from other carmakers that happened to be built in Ireland, because there’s plenty of those. For example, Ford has had a factory in Cork since 1919.

So what do we have for actually Irish-Irish cars? There’s the Shamrock from the ’50s, that’s the one that started it all, but they only made 10 of those over the course of about six months. The most famous Irish car is, of course, the DeLorean DMC-12. Sure the company headquarters may have been in the US, but the only factory was in Ireland, and it was absolutely an Irish-built car.

But that’s not the Irish car I want to talk about today. Today we’re going to discuss the 1983-1987 TMC Costin. You actually may have heard Frank Costin’s name before, or at least part of it, without even realizing it. The cos in the name of the sports car maker Marcos is there because of Costin.

Costin was a British engineer who is known for adapting aeronautical aerodynamic concepts to sports cars, and was a pioneer in monocoque chassis design, designing the bodies for such cars as the Lotus Mark VIII and ’50s Formula One cars, and layter designed racing chassis for Maserati and Lotus. The man knew his shit.

When it came to the TMC Costin (which seems to have been called the Rushabout during development, which is a great name) Costin designed something that looks kind of like a Lotus Seven backed into a small trailer. And, in some ways, that’s kind of what the TMC Costin was – an incredibly lean, purposeful sports car like the Lotus Seven but with some actual luggage space, in this case 16 cubic feet! You could also get a pair of rear-facing kid seats back there, too, which is amazing on so many levels.

The windshield was unique to the TMC Costin, which must make it one of the hardest windshields to find a replacement for in the entire world; they only made about 10 cars a year, and less than 40 were made.

There was also more weather protection than in a Lotus Seven; look up there at that picture of the bigshot being hounded by reporters as he heads to a mostly-enclosed TMC Costin, complete with scissor doors! Also, is he planning to sit on that guy’s lap? Get around to the other side of the car, dummy!

Those taillights look like the same Lucas units I had on my Reliant Scimitar, and also are what were used on Jensen-Healeys, among other British cars, too. It’s kind of charmingly awkward from the rear, but it’s not like the Lotus Seven is all that elegant from behind, either.

You could pick from four Ford fours to power your TMC Costin:

So, a Kent 1600 making 84 hp, a twin-carb XR2 1600 making 110 hp, and a Ford Cosworth BDR 130 hp engine, plus a 150 hp twin-cam version. The chassis, as the brochure mentions, can handle twice that power, something that was later realized, sort of, with the Panoz Roadster, which was built on the chassis/frame of the TMC Costin, the rights to which Panoz bought in 1992.

If you want to dive nice and deep and have some time to kill, this video goes pretty deep into the TMC Costin:

It’s a hell of a car, and arguably the best car ever to be built in County Wexford, Ireland. Happy St. Patrick’s Day!