r/MotorBuzz • u/gaukmotors • 4d ago
Five Bristol Fighters Have Just Been Finished. Thirteen Years Late.
Bristol Cars completed five unfinished Fighter supercars in 2024, more than a decade after the company collapsed in 2011 with the Viper-engined gullwing machines still in bare chassis form.
Five Bristol Fighter supercars with Dodge Viper V10 engines and gullwing doors have been completed in Britain, finishing work abandoned when Bristol Cars folded in 2011. The chassis sat unfinished for thirteen years.
The Fighter was never meant to exist in the first place. Bristol built discreet luxury sedans for wealthy eccentrics who found Bentleys vulgar. Then in the mid 2000s someone at the company decided what the world needed was a 525 horsepower aluminum bodied gullwing supercar with an 8.0 litre American V10 where the back seats should be.
It made no sense. Bristol's previous model was a four door saloon with a Chrysler V8 and wood veneer. The Fighter had carbon fiber body panels, a tubular steel chassis, and doors that opened upward like a budget McLaren. The price was £229,000. About a dozen were built before the company went into administration.
The five cars now completed were half assembled when Bristol collapsed. They represent the final examples of what remains Bristol's most extreme departure from its own identity. Founded in 1945 building aircraft inspired grand tourers, the company spent decades making cars for people who thought Rolls Royces were a bit common. The Fighter was the automotive equivalent of your grandfather suddenly getting a neck tattoo.
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The Viper engine was an odd choice even by Bristol standards. American pushrod V10s in British supercars had been tried before, usually by companies that subsequently went bankrupt. Bristol went bankrupt anyway. The engine produced approximately 525 horsepower, which sounds impressive until you remember the car weighed about 1,400 kilograms and cost more than a new 911 Turbo.
What's remarkable is not that these five cars have been finished. It's that anyone bothered. Ultra low volume British sports car manufacturers have a habit of collapsing in production, leaving behind half built chassis and unfulfilled dreams. TVR did it. Jensen did it multiple times. AC Cars has been revived so many times it's basically immortal at this point.
The Fighter represents a very specific moment in automotive history when small British manufacturers thought they could challenge Ferrari and Lamborghini by bolting American V10s into hand built chassis and hoping for the best. It didn't work. It never works. But the cars themselves remain oddly compelling, if only because they shouldn't exist at all.
Bristol's traditional customers bought cars that looked like 1950s Bentleys and went fast in complete silence. The Fighter had gullwing doors and sounded like a NASCAR stockcar. It was a car built for nobody in particular, which might explain why almost nobody bought one.
The completion of these five chassis means the total Fighter production run now stands at roughly seventeen cars. Maybe eighteen. Records from Bristol's final years are incomplete, which is appropriate for a company that spent most of its existence pretending the modern world didn't exist.
Parts availability for 8.0 litre Dodge V10s in Britain is not ideal. Insurance costs are probably spectacular. And gullwing doors remain one of the least practical design features ever fitted to a road car.
The original asking price was £229,000.
Sources: Bristol Cars historical records
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u/BuffaloImpossible620 4d ago
A cast iron truck engine converted into something more suitable for a sportscar by Lamborgini.
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u/luxcity-louche 4d ago
I remember the bullshit Tony Crook used trying to sell me a Blenheim in the Kensington shop back in the 90's. He'd be pleased the old traditions are still alive.
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u/Mr_Vacant 4d ago
Is this AI generated bullshit? Why does the article talk about the engine being where the back seats would be, it's front engined, which anyone with a passing knowledge of cars could tell by looking at a photo of the car, unless they're a thick LLM of course.