Bristol Cars goes into administration
Discussion
To understand what Bristol is about, just ask a few owners. This from another thread a couple of years ago:
desolate said:
Correct.
With regard to the wider debate - there's any number of cars that are demonstrably "better".
The thread was originally about the Blenheim and I've got to say I really enjoyed mine and thought it was a fine car - I would say it is one of the best cars out there for a long journey. There's lots of boring things about Bristols that make them very good cars to own.
They also look a lot better in real life than they do in the pictures, but there is no doubt that the rear of the Blenheim looks pretty horrible.
With regard to the wider debate - there's any number of cars that are demonstrably "better".
The thread was originally about the Blenheim and I've got to say I really enjoyed mine and thought it was a fine car - I would say it is one of the best cars out there for a long journey. There's lots of boring things about Bristols that make them very good cars to own.
They also look a lot better in real life than they do in the pictures, but there is no doubt that the rear of the Blenheim looks pretty horrible.
desolate said:
I bought it about a month ago, it's been used as the development car so has probably been around the showroom alot. It's got the "S" spec suspension and wheels on now so rides a bit firmer than the standard Fighter and it goes very well, but I've not really had a proper chance to see how it handles. Hope to take it to Millbrook for the day soon to find out.
It does have most of the usual Bristol virtues though
Fantastic All round visibility
Amazing tight turning circle
compact size so it is good to drive around town
decent luggage space
These things seem to get forgotten in a lot of modern cars, (eg huge A posts that create blind spots) but they do make for a car that it a real pleasure to drive in most circumstances.
Those are from somebody who - more than once - put his money where his mouth and heart were.It does have most of the usual Bristol virtues though
Fantastic All round visibility
Amazing tight turning circle
compact size so it is good to drive around town
decent luggage space
These things seem to get forgotten in a lot of modern cars, (eg huge A posts that create blind spots) but they do make for a car that it a real pleasure to drive in most circumstances.
Edited by desolate on Thursday 1st January 16:30
Stu - B said:
What happened to the 5(?) people that paid £100K or so to get "new" Bristol 411s? Were the cars ever made?
As far as I understand they did quite a few - the degree of 'newness' depended on customer requirement. You could take your 411 (or any other model) to them and have as many of the modern bits added as you want. However they did certainly make some full Series 6 cars, with everything new, essentially a brand new Blenheim 3 in a 411 body.tog said:
As far as I understand they did quite a few - the degree of 'newness' depended on customer requirement. You could take your 411 (or any other model) to them and have as many of the modern bits added as you want. However they did certainly make some full Series 6 cars, with everything new, essentially a brand new Blenheim 3 in a 411 body.
The web site has a comprehensive upgrade page. You could do anything from putting air con and electric mirrors in your 1958 406 to reboring the V8 in your 603 to 6.6 or 7.2 litres or fitting uprated brakes for 'light competitive use'. marcosgt said:
Baddie said:
...And there was lots of sound pragmatic engineering - even the old cars had chassis stiffnesses on a par with a McLaren F1...
Can you provide an evidence, references, etc to support that or is it just heresay?If the answer's "no", just say so and don't fob me off with some waffle about unoriginal remarks...
M.
Regarding the stiffness of the McLaren I remember an engineering lecturer about 17 years ago suggesting that, given the know-how of the time, the McLaren F1's chassis would have performed just as well had it been built from aluminium for £11,000 as it did in carbon at £200,000. Then again Jim Randle's son worked in our dept so this may have been a shot from someone connected with the XJ220. Anyway, the McLaren's packaging and chassis are a thing of automotive wonder, but it is not necessarily a benchmark in stiffness. This is given some substance by the following from Peter Stevens (EVO issue 145, July 2010 p118):
"After I left McLaren I worked with Thomas Bscher on his F1 race car because there were things I knew could have been a bit better.... (EVO: Such as?) Well, it wasn't stiff enough at the back. If you did a graph of the stiffness along the chassis, when you got to the rear bulkhead it went down, so we made a little subframe for that" (He goes on to cite other mods).
Bearing in mind there are variations in how chassis stiffness is measured, this link http://www.germancarforum.com/test-data/12334-list... gives some interesting and credible data and also suggests that plenty of steel and aluminium cars are much stiffer than the McLaren. That is not to say better in strength to weight, ability to package the structure around the occupants/mechanicals, or even crash performance. But perhaps stiffer. If I find the data for Bristol I will post it, but if you accept the figure of 13,500 Nm for the Mac it is not unreasonable for a car with a heavy gauge steel chassis and improved loading shared by the roof pillars (603 vs previous Bristols, but pre-Fighter) to achieve or surpass this stiffness. Many mass produced steel monocoques are now indisputably much much stiffer than 13,500 N/m.
Anyhow and OT, apart from the fact that McLaren wanted to build a landmark car that reflected contemporary Formula 1, the F1 could never have been built from aluminium. Ally differs from carbon in it's fatigue response; Bugatti learned as much when they were developing the five aluminium EB110 prototypes and found that the aluminium chassis lost 20% of it's torsional stiffness after 30,000 km testing - hence the carbon production car. (That Bugatti was a very thoroughly developed car, the quote about the chassis stiffness is again from EVO, March 2005). The drop off in performance with fatigue would not have been acceptable to GM.
Edited by Baddie on Friday 11th March 02:44
skwdenyer said:
For all those who think that even the Fighter looks a little gawky, this picture sums up - for me - so much of the quality of both design and execution of the Fighter:
Good pic. & Bristols always look better in the flesh, as stated several times on this forum, (also applies to my wife ;- ).Hmm, I still don't like it. Those little side windows, the shape of the rear glass, etc.. I do agree that they do look better in real life. I wandered passed the showroom on Wednesday, and it's got a much more solid look to it than photos suggest.
skwdenyer said:
For all those who think that even the Fighter looks a little gawky, this picture sums up - for me - so much of the quality of both design and execution of the Fighter:
skwdenyer said:
For all those who think that even the Fighter looks a little gawky, this picture sums up - for me - so much of the quality of both design and execution of the Fighter:
I must say, and I know I'll be accused of being biased, that looks gorgeous! Form following function always works imho. 
skwdenyer said:
For all those who think that even the Fighter looks a little gawky, this picture sums up - for me - so much of the quality of both design and execution of the Fighter:
That just makes it look like something based on a corvette. The front is what makes it look like a rubbish kit carBaddie said:
marcosgt said:
Baddie said:
...And there was lots of sound pragmatic engineering - even the old cars had chassis stiffnesses on a par with a McLaren F1...
Can you provide an evidence, references, etc to support that or is it just heresay?If the answer's "no", just say so and don't fob me off with some waffle about unoriginal remarks...
M.
Regarding the stiffness of the McLaren I remember an engineering lecturer about 17 years ago suggesting that, given the know-how of the time, the McLaren F1's chassis would have performed just as well had it been built from aluminium for £11,000 as it did in carbon at £200,000. Then again Jim Randle's son worked in our dept so this may have been a shot from someone connected with the XJ220. Anyway, the McLaren's packaging and chassis are a thing of automotive wonder, but it is not necessarily a benchmark in stiffness. This is given some substance by the following from Peter Stevens (EVO issue 145, July 2010 p118):
"After I left McLaren I worked with Thomas Bscher on his F1 race car because there were things I knew could have been a bit better.... (EVO: Such as?) Well, it wasn't stiff enough at the back. If you did a graph of the stiffness along the chassis, when you got to the rear bulkhead it went down, so we made a little subframe for that" (He goes on to cite other mods).
Bearing in mind there are variations in how chassis stiffness is measured, this link http://www.germancarforum.com/test-data/12334-list... gives some interesting and credible data and also suggests that plenty of steel and aluminium cars are much stiffer than the McLaren. That is not to say better in strength to weight, ability to package the structure around the occupants/mechanicals, or even crash performance. But perhaps stiffer. If I find the data for Bristol I will post it, but if you accept the figure of 13,500 Nm for the Mac it is not unreasonable for a car with a heavy gauge steel chassis and improved loading shared by the roof pillars (603 vs previous Bristols, but pre-Fighter) to achieve or surpass this stiffness. Many mass produced steel monocoques are now indisputably much much stiffer than 13,500 N/m.
Anyhow and OT, apart from the fact that McLaren wanted to build a landmark car that reflected contemporary Formula 1, the F1 could never have been built from aluminium. Ally differs from carbon in it's fatigue response; Bugatti learned as much when they were developing the five aluminium EB110 prototypes and found that the aluminium chassis lost 20% of it's torsional stiffness after 30,000 km testing - hence the carbon production car. (That Bugatti was a very thoroughly developed car, the quote about the chassis stiffness is again from EVO, March 2005). The drop off in performance with fatigue would not have been acceptable to GM.
I don't have any figures to dispute the claims, but Bristol were always very wary about releasing cars to the press, which never inspired much confidence in their claims.
If the McLaren wasn't much good though, why would they use it as a benchmark?
Anyway, I'm skeptical, but genuinely interested to know if there was any evidence to support Bristol's claims. If the car was especially stiff, it's impressive engineering, but I remain doubtful.
M.
Its a real shame for many reasons. But here definitely is not another company out there like Bristol used to be.
If I had won a mega euro millions a Fighter and a Blenheim 3 would probably have made it in my garage. Not just because they are different but also because I like them.
have a lok at this from the new york times.
Toby Silverton, chairman of Bristol Cars, is terribly disappointed. Sitting with him in Bristol’s only showroom in the world, on Kensington High Street, I’ve explained that 50 percent of my friends and car-loving colleagues had no idea who or what Bristol was when I mentioned my plan to visit the company — horrible news for any other car manufacturer.
“That’s bad,” Mr. Silverton says, stoically. “We usually try to keep that figure down to only 25 percent.”
http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/11/bristol...
If I had won a mega euro millions a Fighter and a Blenheim 3 would probably have made it in my garage. Not just because they are different but also because I like them.
have a lok at this from the new york times.
Toby Silverton, chairman of Bristol Cars, is terribly disappointed. Sitting with him in Bristol’s only showroom in the world, on Kensington High Street, I’ve explained that 50 percent of my friends and car-loving colleagues had no idea who or what Bristol was when I mentioned my plan to visit the company — horrible news for any other car manufacturer.
“That’s bad,” Mr. Silverton says, stoically. “We usually try to keep that figure down to only 25 percent.”
http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/11/bristol...
marcosgt said:
If the McLaren wasn't much good though, why would they use it as a benchmark?
Anyway, I'm skeptical, but genuinely interested to know if there was any evidence to support Bristol's claims. If the car was especially stiff, it's impressive engineering, but I remain doubtful.
M.
I think the answer is that the McLaren was relatively stiff when conceived twenty years ago (perhaps not stiff enough given variously documented handling issues in race and road format) but that things have moved on an awful lot since. However, if you look at a photo of a Mac F1 monocoque it is quite easy to believe that the designers exploited the excellence of the material to give more freedom in the shape of the structure for the sake of packaging and practicality. For example the door apertures are large while roof and screen pillars are very slender. Continuing my amateur analysis, the two main rear buttresses that support the powertrain do not seem to be solidly linked at the rear, but I may be wrong about that once the car is assembled. I would have thought the two longitudinal box sections that pass through the cockpit make a big contribution to its documented crash performance.Anyway, I'm skeptical, but genuinely interested to know if there was any evidence to support Bristol's claims. If the car was especially stiff, it's impressive engineering, but I remain doubtful.
M.
The point was that it is possible to surpass the McLaren's stiffness with ordinary materials. One tends to associate box sections with ladder chassis in old school off roaders that are strong locally but really quite flexible torsionally. But the Disco 3 integrated box sections into a monocoque to create a structure that was stiff but retained traditional strength at suspension input points. I don't know how the box sections are used in the Bristol 603 platform, but it was a bespoke handbuilt chassis, it WAS built to last, and it was subject to different packaging and performance requirements than most other cars. It was also, allegedly, very strong in impacts.
Another point that has been made concerns the CoG claims. While I will never be able to find any data to resolve that, and I'm sure there are many factors involved (heavy low box-sections in the chassis?), the OHV Chrysler V10 probably plays a big part. Quad-cam V-engines are wide and tall, with weight concentrated in the cylinder head. If this doesn't seem an important factor, it is interesting to remember how Jaguar developed the XJR9/12, which raced with SOHC 7-7.4 litre 24 valve V12s. DOHC 48 valve heads were tried in testing but never raced. Not only was the extra weight substantial and all in the rear half of the car, it was also relatively high, resulting in no overall vehicle performance gains regardless of engine performance. Of course this isn't directly transferrable to most modern road cars because DOHC multi-valve heads suit variable valve timing and are better for emissions as well as engine performance - but there really is more than one way to skin a cat. This is why I consider the Bristol to have pragmatic and original engineering solutions. I think the same of Bentley's ongoing use of its 6.75 litre V8, which presumably avoids many issues facing other road car engines by doing the best of its heroic work below 4k rpm.
PS recognition of the McLaren's failings does not mean I don't think it's a wonderful car - its engine is still the best in a road car IMHO. But as far as I have read the F1 is flawed (probably more than GM seems ever prepared to admit, especially given Steven's testimony), like a Ferrari or a Bristol is a flawed car. The MP4-12C seems to have very few flaws, it is numerically exceptional. But speaking purely on a personal level, its triumph of science has come at the expense of the art of vehicle engineering, and while I admire it, it has absolutely no draw for me whatsoever. A Fighter can only better it on claimed top speed, but once all the techie details have been digested it is a much more interesting machine.
PPS I will try and track down some stiffness data when I finish nights as I'm really curious about it as well now!
Baddie said:
However, if you look at a photo of a Mac F1 monocoque it is quite easy to believe that the designers exploited the excellence of the material to give more freedom in the shape of the structure for the sake of packaging and practicality.
Another point that has been made concerns the CoG claims. While I will never be able to find any data to resolve that, and I'm sure there are many factors involved (heavy low box-sections in the chassis?), the OHV Chrysler V10 probably plays a big part. Quad-cam V-engines are wide and tall, with weight concentrated in the cylinder head.
The problem with boiling down these two figures is that it opens up the field to other cars that share such attributes. By that reasoning the Viper that donates the V10 engine and uses a similar chassis construction must also have a very low centre of gravity, and presumably there are many other cars, performance or otherwise, that have a higher torsional rigidity than the F1.Another point that has been made concerns the CoG claims. While I will never be able to find any data to resolve that, and I'm sure there are many factors involved (heavy low box-sections in the chassis?), the OHV Chrysler V10 probably plays a big part. Quad-cam V-engines are wide and tall, with weight concentrated in the cylinder head.
All it means is that the stats are cherry picked to make it sound impressive.
Personally I still don't see how a car that purports to have a 'massive' steel roll cage frame integrated into the roof structure can have a lower CofG than a car with a carbon monocoque.
The Wookie said:
The problem with boiling down these two figures is that it opens up the field to other cars that share such attributes. By that reasoning the Viper that donates the V10 engine and uses a similar chassis construction must also have a very low centre of gravity, and presumably there are many other cars, performance or otherwise, that have a higher torsional rigidity than the F1.
All it means is that the stats are cherry picked to make it sound impressive.
Personally I still don't see how a car that purports to have a 'massive' steel roll cage frame integrated into the roof structure can have a lower CofG than a car with a carbon monocoque.
Because it also has a massive steel chassis at hub level. CoG is a ratio, not an absolute. The carbon chassis makes it harder to lower the CoG, not easier.All it means is that the stats are cherry picked to make it sound impressive.
Personally I still don't see how a car that purports to have a 'massive' steel roll cage frame integrated into the roof structure can have a lower CofG than a car with a carbon monocoque.
skwdenyer said:
Because it also has a massive steel chassis at hub level. CoG is a ratio, not an absolute. The carbon chassis makes it harder to lower the CoG, not easier.
It must be very heavy then. I note that the website talks about the T version's "lightweight interior", "lightweight steering wheel", lightweight seats and lightweight wheels.skwdenyer said:
Because it also has a massive steel chassis at hub level. CoG is a ratio, not an absolute. The carbon chassis makes it harder to lower the CoG, not easier.
True but you can't deny despite the heavy, low chassis, having a large piece of mass right at the top of the car is going to have a considerable effect on the CofG, and a quick google image search will show how low the heavy items like the Engine are on an Enzo.The Wookie said:
skwdenyer said:
Because it also has a massive steel chassis at hub level. CoG is a ratio, not an absolute. The carbon chassis makes it harder to lower the CoG, not easier.
True but you can't deny despite the heavy, low chassis, having a large piece of mass right at the top of the car is going to have a considerable effect on the CofG, and a quick google image search will show how low the heavy items like the Engine are on an Enzo.Gassing Station | General Gassing | Top of Page | What's New | My Stuff