Triumph TR3 values: TR3B over TR3A over TR3, the works cars apart, and a market back to 2010 prices

The TR3 is the car that gave the world disc brakes and Triumph its American reputation, and Triumph TR3 values are the most tightly bunched of any sports car on this site: 490 recorded sales since 1996, about 40 a year lately, at a median of £18,300, with the middle half between £13,600 and £23,400. Three-quarters of the cars offered find a buyer. The spread runs from a £560 project to £163,000 for a works competition car, and between the early small-mouth TR3, the wide-mouth TR3A and the run-out TR3B the medians differ by barely £3,000, which makes the TR3 a market where condition and originality decide almost everything.

The Triumph TR3 model guide covers the three versions, how to tell them apart, the disc brakes and what to check. This page is about the money, and about a market that has slipped back to where it was fifteen years ago.

TR3B over TR3A over TR3

The variant table on this page has three lines and little between them. The TR3A of 1957 to 1962, the wide-mouth car with the exterior door handles and the lockable boot, is two-thirds of the record, 327 recorded sales at a median of £18,500; the small-mouth TR3 of 1955 to 1957, the original with the recessed grille, sits at £17,500 across 121; and the TR3B of 1962, the run-out car built for the American market with the TR4’s 2.2-litre engine and all-synchromesh gearbox, leads at £20,800 across 41. The order is the usual one for a side-screen TR: the scarcest and most usable car at the top, the most numerous in the middle, and the earliest a little below, with a collector’s premium for an original small-mouth car that appears only at the top of the range.

The gap between a good car and a great one is far wider than the gap between the versions. Good usable TR3s of any kind sit between £15,000 and £25,000, the best restored cars reach £30,000 to £40,000, and the works competition cars, the factory TR3s and TR3As of the late-1950s Le Mans and rally programmes, sit apart from everything on their individual histories; the £163,000 that tops the record, for a works TR3A in 2018, describes that car and no other. Cars built to works specification later sell as modified TR3s.

What moves the price of a TR3

The chassis, then the steering wheel. A TR3 is a separate-chassis car and the chassis rusts at the rails towards the rear and around the suspension mountings; a rotten one means a body-off restoration that costs more than the finished car, so a car with a sound or documented chassis, with the receipts, sits in the upper half of its range whatever the paint. The body follows, at the sills, the floors, the inner wings and the rear wings, and the wet-liner engine and the running gear, simple and well supported by the Triumph specialists, move the price least.

Then where the car came from. Most TR3s were exported, the great majority to America, and a genuine home-market right-hand-drive car sells at a premium in Britain of perhaps ten to twenty per cent over a left-hand-drive import, with a declared conversion somewhere between and an undeclared one the fastest way to lose a sale. Then originality and specification: the correct engine, overdrive, wire wheels, the factory hardtop, a period colour and the early features on a small-mouth car all add, and a long history file with the club’s involvement adds more. Mileage, on a car that has usually been restored at least once, means little.

Back to 2010 prices

The chart shows a plateau and a slide. The yearly median was around £14,000 to £17,500 in the late 2000s, rose to £19,600 in 2012 and sat between £18,000 and £24,500 through the 2010s, peaking at £22,500 in 2018. It dipped to £17,600 in 2019, recovered to £20,500 in 2020, and has slid since: £18,800 in 2021, £19,300 in 2022, £18,500 in 2023, £17,000 in 2024 and £15,700 in 2025, with the 2026 figure so far about £15,000. Restated in today’s money the TR3 has lost nearly half its value since 2018 and is cheaper than it was in 2010.

The sample explains part of it, with the online auctions bringing the ordinary and the left-hand-drive cars into a record that once held mostly restored home-market ones; the rest is the cause the MGA and the Austin-Healey 100 share, a 1950s sports car whose buyers are leaving the market while the buyers who follow want something later and faster. The small-mouth cars and the TR3Bs have held up better than the median; the ordinary TR3A, which is most of the record, has not, and a sound one is now the cheapest good 1950s British sports car with disc brakes.

Where TR3s change hands

The TR3 sells on both sides of the Atlantic, where most of them went new. The British regional sale rooms and the Triumph specialists sell the home-market cars and the imports that have settled here, and a single fortnight in late July and early August 2026 shows the range: TR3As at £15,400 and £18,500 at a Herefordshire sale, a TR3 at £10,000 at a Yorkshire one and a TR3A at £18,100 at a southern sale; the American online platforms sell the rest, with a TR3A at £14,700 in July. The works cars and the best restorations pass through the catalogued international sales at prices above the recorded range. Whether a recorded price includes the buyer’s premium varies by sale, which is one more reason to read the usual range rather than any single result.

Insuring, restoring, selling

For an agreed-value policy a good TR3A belongs around its median and a restored car in the upper half of the range; a small-mouth car with its early features and a TR3B sit at their own figures, and a works car on its history. On restoration the arithmetic is the chassis’s: a body-off rebuild costs more than a standard car is worth, so the right buy is the car with that work done, and the project is for the owner who wants the doing of it. If you are selling, the spring is the season, the chassis photographs and the heritage certificate sell the car, and the honest expectation for an ordinary TR3A is its median, not the figure a restored small-mouth car fetched in 2018.

Related

The TR3 sits between the TR2 that started the line, which sells for a little more on a far smaller record, and the TR4 that replaced it, which sells for about the same; its rival in period was the MGA, which sells for a little more, and the Austin-Healey 100, which sells for twice as much. For the decade, see British classic cars of the 1950s. For how all the figures on this site are compiled, see what classic cars sell for.