Cerbera front harness connector guide

This page summarises the front-harness side of the TVR Cerbera’s electrical system, based on the factory “Cerbera Electrical Connections – Revision 3” wire list. It is intended as an orientation guide so you can identify connectors when working under the dash, in the doors or around the front of the car. For full pin-by-pin wire colours and destinations you should always work from the original factory document — the figures there have been verified against production cars and are too safety-critical to paraphrase loosely.

Applies to: TVR Cerbera (Speed Six and AJP8 cars sharing the Revision 3 harness).

Background

During the Cerbera’s production life TVR switched supplier for the small wire-to-wire multi-pin connectors used throughout the front harness. The earlier AMP “Duomate” parts were superseded by the ITT Cannon “Trident” snap-together range, and Revision 3 of the factory wire list reflects that change along with minor tweaks to power distribution and ECU interfacing. If your car has a mixture of connector styles, that is normal — many cars were repaired or updated piecemeal.

Alongside the Trident parts, the harness uses a handful of other connector families:

ITT Cannon Trident snap-together housings (2, 3, 6, 12 and 24 way) for most general wiring.
MIC IV multi-way housings (9 and 17 way) for the switch-pack interface, heater control unit and steering-wheel control unit.
Grote & Hartmann 19-way hybrid power/signal connectors at the engine bay and nose splits (4 power pins plus 15 signal pins).
Pioneer ISO blocks (brown and black) for the radio.
6.3 mm spade terminals with insulating covers for simple switches such as the brake-light and handbrake switches.
Framatome brake-servo style terminals on the low brake fluid switch.

What lives where

The Revision 3 wire list labels each connector J1, J2, J3 … and so on. Rather than reproducing the full pin tables, the connectors group roughly as follows.

Around the dashboard and column

J4 Column pod harness (12-way Trident) — carries the start, stop and fuel-pump signals from the column-mounted buttons, plus ignition, battery, earth and illumination feeds.
J6 Dash switches’ interface unit (9-way MIC IV) — handles the headlamp, sidelamp, fog lamp and fog warning-lamp signals along with illumination.
J7 Instrument pod (24-way Trident) — the main feed into the binnacle, carrying speedo signal, warning lamps (main beam, oil pressure, EFI, alternator, shift, handbrake, brake fluid, seat belt, inertia switch), tacho input and ICE LED feeds.
J16 Ignition switch (2-way Trident) and J11 handbrake switch (twin 6.3 mm spades).
J20 Low brake fluid switch on the master cylinder — two Framatome terminals.
J25 Steering wheel control unit (17-way MIC IV) — indicator, horn, hazard, main/dip beam and wiper stalk signals.

Doors and interior

The driver’s and passenger’s doors each use two connectors:

A 12-way Trident (J8 and J18) for the latch microswitches, inner/outer release sensors, window motor drives, mirror heater, mirror motor wiring and door-position signal.
A 3-way Trident (J9 and J19) for the door speaker and illumination feed.

The two doors share a common return for the mirror motors, so the “mirror 1”, “mirror 2” and common wires run directly between the door connectors rather than back to the body. The inner lock button and door-status LED use their own small 6-way Trident (J17), and the courtesy lamp sub-harness uses a 3-way (J5).

Heater and air conditioning

The Cerbera heater box splits the hot-air and cold-air sides between two 6-way Trident connectors (J12 and J13), each with its own fan-speed feed (“hot speed” and “cold speed”). The fresh-air/A-C side also passes the A-C request signal through to the engine bay. The heater control unit itself uses two 17-way MIC IV connectors (J14 and J15) which handle the fan speeds, ICE LEDs, mirror heat, heated rear window, A-C clutch and acknowledge signals, and the cabin thermistor feeds.

Engine bay and nose

Two large Grote & Hartmann 19-way connectors form the main splits in the harness:

J10 Engine harness connector — carries fuel pump drive, radiator fan drives, lambda heater, oil pressure, alternator warning lamp, ignition coil and injector feeds, starter solenoid, shift and EFI warning lamps, purge valve, tacho and the A-C clutch/acknowledge/request lines.
J21 Nose connector — horns, washers, side, main, dip and indicator feeds for both sides, engine fan drives, A-C request and thermistor wiring.

Miscellaneous

J1 Bonnet switch (2-way Trident).
J2 Brake light switch (twin spades).
J3 Cigarette lighter (3-way Trident).
J22/J23 Radio — standard Pioneer ISO brown (speakers) and black (power, ignition, illumination, earth) blocks.
J24 Reverse light switch on the gearbox (2-way sealed).

Common gotchas

A few details from the factory list are worth flagging because they catch people out:

The Cerbera uses a number of spliced joints (numbered SJ1 through SJ14 in the manual) for shared feeds such as ignition, battery, illumination and the side-repeater lines. If a circuit is dead it is often one of these joints buried in the loom rather than a connector pin.
The mirror motor wiring is a single shared loop between the two doors; faults on one side can therefore appear on the other.
Several apparently identical green wires are in fact separate ignition feeds taken from different spliced joints. Don’t bridge them together when troubleshooting — they exist separately for load-sharing and fusing reasons.
The Grote & Hartmann 19-way housings mix 3 mm² power pins with 0.5 mm² signal pins. Use the correct terminal for each cavity when re-pinning, or you will lose contact pressure on the power pins.

Working on the harness

If you are repairing or modifying the Cerbera’s electrics:

Buy the correct ITT Cannon Trident terminals and seals for the housing you are working on, not generic crimps. The seals are part of the connector’s strain relief.
Crimp with the proper tool — solder joints inside these housings tend to fatigue and fail.
Label everything before you unpick it. The wire colours repeat across the car (there are several black/white wires, for example) and only the connector position disambiguates them.
For anything safety-critical — brake fluid switch, handbrake warning, inertia switch, starter solenoid feed, ignition supplies — check continuity end-to-end against the factory wire list before reassembly, and if in any doubt have an auto-electrician verify the work.

Where to get the full pin data

This page deliberately does not reproduce the full pin-by-pin tables from the Revision 3 document. If you need to identify an individual wire by colour or trace a specific pin, work from the original factory wire list (widely circulated in the Cerbera community as a PDF) or from a known-good car. The TVR Car Club technical archive and the usual Cerbera specialists listed on the suppliers page can help if you cannot locate a copy.

Summarised from the factory “Cerbera Electrical Connections – Revision 3” wire list circulated within the TVR community — see the original document for the complete pin tables and wire colours.