Wednesday 17th October 1962

The Triumph Spitfire was launched at the London Motor Show. To quote Ronald ‘Steady’ Barker, writing in Autocar: ‘It is very civilised, with winding windows and plenty of luggage space, and £730 for a 90-plus mph car seems reasonable enough.’ While the other new cars at the Motor Show (Ford Cortina, Morris 1100, MGB, Lotus Elan, etc) also received equally good coverage in the motoring press, the front-page headlines of the October ’62 newspapers were focused on the confrontation between the USA and USSR, and the outcome of the Cuban missile crisis. Thankfully, by the end of the month, the threat of a nuclear war had been averted after the Russians agreed to withdraw their weapons from Fidel Castro’s Caribbean island.