By the Seventies the sports saloon had really come of age. Ford showed that, because of motor sport success, it could sell ship-loads of Escorts. Other makers wanted a slice of the action – Triumph chief among them, with the Dolomite deemed an ideal base for something fruity. Led by Rover’s Spen King, the Triumph Dolomite Sprint engineers won a Design Council award for the new model’s innovative single-cam, 16-valve cylinder head – and British Leyland advertising literature of the time incorporated one of the best puns of the era, ‘The award has gone to our head’.
