The Roadster Factory, a link to some of the auto industry’s most storied brands, nearly all of them orphaned, might not be familiar to most Americans, but it generated millions of dollars in annual sales, an enterprise that was vitally important to tens of thousands of car enthusiasts in North America and elsewhere.
The family owned shop, founded in a small apartment 45 years ago, supplied spare automotive parts and technical expertise to hobbyists, garages and restoration businesses all over North America.
The Armagh, Pa., business was completely destroyed in a fire on Christmas Day, a shock to enthusiasts and passionate collectors determined to see discontinued brands roll on.
The Roadster Factory essentially became the source for factory quality replacement parts and repair information for around one million classic MG and Triumph sports cars sold here from the 1950s to the early 1980s.
It is a good example of what happens to a brand once it is folded up and leaves the fast-paced world of auto shows, concept cars, franchised dealers, mercurial executives and all the other things we cover here in the pages of Automotive News.
Discontinued brands, in a sense, freeze in time, but they do not die.
Instead, those who have dedicated their lives to them become the brand stewards, setting up businesses that provide parts and service so that the cars can continue to be enjoyed long after the franchised dealers that sold them move on.
Name a discontinued brand — Saab, Citroen, Packard, DeLorean, Pontiac, Rover, Studebaker and countless others — and you will find people who are just as passionate about it as Roadster Factory founder Charles Runyan was about Triumph and later MG.
Runyan, who passed away on Christmas Eve in 2018, was the steward in America of the Triumph brand for more than 40 years.
Triumph, which sold nearly 500,000 sports cars in the U.S. from 1954-81, was part of British Leyland, which ended sports cars sales here in 1980 and ’81 when MG and then Triumph were discontinued.
I bought my first Triumph, a Saffron 1972 TR6, around 1981.
Many years after Triumph was dropped, I could go to Collier Jaguar in Orlando, the former British Leyland dealer, and order any part I needed that was still available.
The dealer, David Collier, knew something about customer loyalty, discontinued brands and the importance of taking care of customers until they were ready for their next new cars — no matter how long that took. Collier, who died in 1998, got his start as a dealer selling Studebakers. Long after that brand died in the mid-1960s, he would not turn away a customer who needed service. Collier had his share of success converting Studebaker customers to one of his other brands, and later he did the same with MG and Triumph customers.
While British Leyland did a superb job supplying factory replacement parts for around a decade after MG and Triumph production ended, more and more parts became unavailable by the early 1990s, and that’s where Runyan saw an opportunity to greatly expand his business.
Though he started with Triumph, he added MG. He then contracted with original British parts suppliers when possible and commissioned new runs of in-demand parts. Some components, he discovered, could be sourced in the U.S. with the same or better quality and often at lower costs. His highly detailed catalogs have become collector’s items. The staff could answer the most arcane technical question.
Until Christmas day, anyone who wanted to repair a classic MGB, Triumph TR2-TR8 or Spitfire or GT6, could get almost any part from The Roadster Factory delivered to their doorstep the next day.
But not anymore.
The fire that consumed the Roadster Factory’s 48,000 square-foot warehouse burned for more than a dozen hours and required around 100 firefighters from 13 local fire departments.
“As the sun rose on Christmas morning, all that was left was a gutted brick structure in the front of the business and smoldering ruins behind,” the Tribune-Democrat, a local newspaper, reported Monday.
Runyan’s son, Albert, who took over the business from his father, declined to comment to the newspaper as he stood at dawn on Christmas morning and watched 45 years of family history and millions of dollars in parts turn to ash.
The Roadster Factory’s customers, though, had plenty to say on Facebook pages dedicated to the sports cars.
“So hard to believe. It’s like losing a friend,” wrote Donald Olshavsky. “This is very bad. TRF was the best Triumph supplier/supporter on this side of the pond. This is a huge loss for our marque,” wrote Brian H. Smith, who owns a 1980 Triumph TR7.
Tom Thurman of Louisville, Ky., in an online forum for Triumph owners, called it a tremendous setback.
“The loss of so much research material, knowledge, rare original parts and tooling samples, documents, etc. is devastating,” Thurman wrote on Triumph Experience. “RIP TRF, I can’t see them coming back from this. I pray this doesn’t turn out to be intentional.”
There are other businesses, of course, that sell at least some mechanical parts to keep an old MG or Triumph going. But there was always The Roadster Factory and everyone else. And Roadster Factory’s fiery demise just made it that much more difficult to own a classic British roadster.
MG and Triumph stopped mattering a long time ago to those in the business who sell and service new cars. But MG and Triumph — and many other discontinued brands — still provide jobs and careers for the thousands of people working in a quiet backwater of the auto industry that doesn’t get much attention in these pages. But the effects of that fire will be felt in many places far away from Armagh, Pa.