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.
Aren’t the ones on the last Bristol Audi a4 lamps? Sorry if I am mistaken.
Ah, Bristol. The only car company that banned Jeremy Clarkson from testing its vehicles AND blocked a Bristol owner from buying another Bristol after he ignored Bristol’s request to all its customers and let Clarkson test his new Fighter supercoupe.