‘THE FIRST BRISTOL CAR DESIGNED BY CAD and not by a quill pen and ink.’ The words of Toby Silverton, the man whose baby the Fighter was. And while he may have had his tongue firmly in his cheek, there’s no question that the Fighter was nothing if not an audacious break with the past.
Bristol Cars had made its reputation in the post-war years with a series of aristocratic saloons and sports cars – elegant, streamlined machines that combined BMW-derived underpinnings with aerospace standards of construction (the car company originally being a spin-off from the Bristol Aircraft Corporation). Then in the ’60s came Chrysler V8 power and a new generation of gentlemen’s expresses – fast, discreet, and hand-built in small numbers.
But from the mid-’70s it all began to go a bit pear-shaped – or, rather, brick-shaped. The cars lost their subtle curves, sales began to decline, and eventually there was no money to develop new models, only to re-skin old ones. By the late ’90s, Bristol was building barely a handful of cars a year for a dwindling clientele and the company was on its uppers.
Enter the young entrepreneur Silverton, whose father had founded Land Rover modifiers Overfinch but who had made his own fortune in the jet spares business and was now looking for a new adventure. ‘I’d always been intrigued by Bristol,’ he tells me. ‘When I was about 15 I was riding in a friend’s E-type and we were whistling down the M4 at a steady 110 and something was gaining on us. Turned out to be a 411, being driven by a man with white hair. And when we turned off the motorway he followed us. My friend was a pretty handy driver but the Bristol eventually sailed past with utter ease. Years later, when I told Tony Crook the story, he revealed that about that time he’d lent his demonstrator to [Le Mans winner] Roy Salvadori…’
It’s impossible to talk about Bristol without talking about Tony Crook. Wartime RAF pilot, post-war racing driver, motor dealer and one of the great characters of the British car industry, Crook took a stake in Bristol in 1960 and by 1973 was sole
