I’m not sure if this is a controversial take or not, but I feel pretty comfortable saying that the Bristol Type 603 – later known as the Bristol Britannia, Brigand, and then Blenheim, is, charitably, a steaming pile. It’s not so much that it’s a bad design or concept – it’s a fairly handsome (for the most part) old-school GT car, it uses decent and powerful Chrysler V8s, and I think in the first decade or so of production, it was a pretty appealing car.
But this thing lumbered on from 1976 to 2011 – and was based on a chassis that traces its origins back to 1946 – and over time became a vastly overpriced and obsolete relic with build quality on par with a toddler’s sandcastle and relying on nothing more than abject snobbery to remain alive. The build quality on these was just abysmal, though evidence of this was quite hard to find, because the head of Bristol, Tony Crook, absolutely detested journalists and would never loan a car to one to try out.
When journalists did manage to get ahold of one to try, via various forms of skullduggery and blackmail, the results were never exactly positive. These are cars that cost upwards of $250,000, so it’s not like they need to get a lot of slack cut for being affordable, because they are very much not. The amount of classist bullshit tied up in these things is pretty staggering, and is really the only thing that sustained the brand for the last two or three decades. In that sense, it’s pretty remarkable, even if the cars aren’t.
Actually, I do have to give the Bristol Type 603 some credit for one thing, at least: they had one of the best spare tire placements of any car ever:
That’s pretty great, I admit.
Now, I originally wanted to talk about the Bristol Type 603’s taillights, because Bristol never made any of their own, and borrowed them from other makers. Taillights are actually quite costly things to develop because of all the regulatory and approval hoops that have to be leaped through, so it’s often easier to just let another company just do the work and then make them fit, somehow, into your own design, which is what Bristol did.
What I like about studying the taillights Bristol used is that it sort of gives a good look at how taillights really do reflect the era of design they’re in, and how dramatically a set of taillights can update and change the look of a given car.
With that in mind, let’s start with a look at the first lights used, which were snagged from a Hillman Hunter:
Well, I should say Hillman Hunter and off-the-shelf round (likely Lucas) lights from a catalog because there appears to be at least one example of that, too, as you can see above. These simple, rectangular Hillman lights were rotated to a vertical orientation, where they fit into the pontoon-sided design with a prominent rear-fender line that was common for the late ’60s and early 1970s, and since this car’s design was an evolution of the Bristol 411, introduced in 1969, that makes sense.
They were perhaps a bit too rectangular for the 603, which wasn’t especially curvy but wasn’t exactly crisp-edged, either, but these generally worked. Reverse lamps and what I suspect are rear fog lamps were separate units, flanking the license plate on the trunk lid.
In 1982, the 603’s name changed to names derived from old Bristol aircraft, and became the Britannia and Brigand, with the Brigand being the one that got a turbocharger. The look was tweaked a bit, with new taillights being the big change at the rear:
This time, the taillights are from the Bedford CF2 van, and despite their workhorse origins, are striking and interesting taillights. They’re excellent examples of the Layer Cake school of taillight design, even if they lack any real sort of “wraparound” dimensionality common to that category. Still, they’re visually arresting lights, and they incorporate all taillight functions into the main unit, freeing the trunk lid from having to house reverse or rear fog lamps.
The amount of work these lights do to make the car have an ’80s feel is pretty remarkable; despite the body lines, those bold, rectangular, colorful lights pull that ’70s design into the next decade, with a bit of assistance from the redesigned bumpers. Those two elements are really all that changed at the rear of the car, and yet they just barely manage to get the job done. It feels, at least upon a casual glance, like an ’80s car.
In 1994, another update was undertaken, which is good from a taillight standpoint, because those Bedford lights really weren’t in line with 1990s taillight design trends. Bristol found another donor, and those lights changed the look of the rear of the car, now called the Blenheim, pretty dramatically:
Bristol took the Blenheim’s lights from an Opel Senator B, which featured large taillights in a very river-rock-gently-curvy 1990s style, taillights that filled up a lot of area on the rear of the car and were divided into two sections per light, one on the corner, wrapping around the edge and featuring the tail/brake and turn indicator, and one on the trunk lid with the reverse lamp and rear fog/extra brake/tail.
On the Opel, the design of the car and the lights kept the two light sections looking visually connected, with black borders in a cruciform pattern hiding the division between body lights and trunk lid lights. Visually, they appeared as one cohesive unit.
On the Bristol, due to the way the body was designed and the larger size of the rear fender area, there was a significant gap between the taillight’s sections, a gap that on some cars was blacked out, and on some cars was left body-colored, which made it even more noticeable.
It feels kind of awkward, to be honest, especially on the body-colored-gap ones. The gap really drives home that these lights were not actually made for this car, and I’m somewhat surprised they went with them at all. On the plus side, they once again do update the look of the rear, so now while it’s still awkward-looking, at least it seems to be an awkward-looking car from the 1990s.
Finally, there was one more taillight update made, though I think only one car was actually built, in 2009, to incorporate it before Bristol stopped building cars altogether:
Yes, this time a 2000 to 2004 Audi A6 Avant donated its taillights, with the Bristol, it appears, covering up the upper corners of the lamps with a little angled bit of the trunk lid, a clever way to get a bit more of a distinctive look. It’s a shame only one of these was made – at least from a taillight perspective – because I think these Audi lights work very well and are well-integrated into the design.
The revised body-colored bumpers are also doing a lot of work here to update the Bristol’s archaic sheetmetal, and I think overall, you have to be impressed with how much the taillight and bumper changes manage to push this car three decades beyond its original design.
Yes, I genuinely think that. accounting for the price and hilarious associated snobbery, the Bristol Type 603 is a rolling tub of turds. But, I have to hand it to Bristol for their determined and dogged attempts to keep the car updated, often through just taillight and bumper changes. If anything, I hope this impresses upon you the visual power of taillights when it comes to how we determine a car’s era. They’re not to be underestimated.
Actually back to 1936. The chassis is based on the pre-war BMW 326.
Today’s taillight quiz:
What taillights were featured on the Noble M12/M400 and Rossion Q1?
So, Torch, speaking of world’s worst cars, when are we going to see another edition of the redemption series?!?
Maybe you should go easy on yourself and make it a weekly series. There are 300-ish cars, right? That will only take ~6 years to get through. I plan on sticking around for that long.
The way those fog and reverse lights are unevenly tacked onto the tails of two of them, the fitment on the Opel version, and the rattle can cheapness of the black trim reminds me of any number of 20+ year old hand-me-down beaters in the boy racer section of a Pep Boys parking lot. Did anyone actually look at the one they were buying before handing over a check? Is the snobbism alone really that appealing? Yeah, OK, The Emperor’s New Clothes, but there are plenty of snob cars that actually offer something in return.
I’ve only ever seen one Bristol, I think it was a 404. Nothing stood out as being badly made, but I also wasn’t terribly interested as there were cooler cars around, it was more just curiosity for being the first one I’d seen and it was decent looking enough. The Fighter seemed kind of neat, if more like a kit car than an established OEM with the typical exaggerated claims one might expect from a kit maker. LJK Setright famously loved Bristols, so I’m surprised they (at least the later ones) are such trash. Maybe it was the earlier ones he was writing about?
Taillights police! The last donor is in fact a 2001-2004 Audi A4 Avant (B6), not an A6. I’ll walk myself out now.
Thank you! It was driving me nuts that Torch got it wrong and I’m actually surprised he didn’t catch this one before publishing the article. The tail lights are clearly different.
Was going to comment on that too. Wrong tail lights.
Years ago, someone (who was probably desperate to find a present for Christmas and heard I was a car guy) gave me a coffee table book called “The Great Book of Sports Cars”.
Along with the usual suspects (Porsche, MG, Triumph, Corvette, etc.) it had pages and pages devoted to Bristols. I’m not sure why the author thought that they qualified as sports cars – they certainly didn’t seem to fit the category.
I’d never heard of them before (or since). Trust Torch to bring them up.
With the article headline, I could taillight away that you wrote this, Jason!
All car designers should begin with the taillights and proceed out from there.
If I recall correctly – this is almost exactly what Volvo did with the first S60 – as the car was designed from back to front.
If my mother’s S60 is typical, it was designed ass backwards.
Now work out where the lights on a Bristol Fighter came from!
The Audi lights are from a B6 A4 Avant. The little kink in the trunklid is matched to the shape of the lights as designed by Audi.
Jason, I think you meant the A4 Avant for the updated lights.
Hmm, now you are judging what’s (one of) the worst cars of all time, has all that looking in that horrible book by that horrible guy somehow gotten to you?
I always thought it looked like a stretched Ford Escort Mk2, and really unappealing. I would like a Bristol from before they got strange and ugly – just because! – I think the last decent one was the 411 .
The 411 also had beautifully integrated taillights – from a Hillman Minx, I believe?
411 is correct. A neighbour of mine when I was a kid had one and it was just elegant and so much classier than another neighbours Rolls.
I was thinking the same thing. However, if Bristol was charging upwards of $200,000 for these things in the 21st century, I’d say this is one car that deserves the ridicule. At least for the ’94s and newer. God, using those Opal lights on that car would have been a crime even if they only charged $20,000 for it in 94.