This British Automaker Found The Weirdest Place To Put The Spare Tire

If you get a flat tire out on the open road, you’ll soon be looking for your spare tire. If you found yourself behind the wheel of a classic Bristol, though, you could check all the traditional spots and you’d come up short. This cheeky British automaker found an entirely weird and unique place to stash the spare that no other automaker has copied since.

Given the massive wheel sizes used on modern cars, most vehicles don’t carry a full-sized spare anymore. Instead, automakers rely on tiny space—saver wheels and stash them under the trunk floor to minimize the impact on usable cargo space.  Historically, though, cars ran much smaller wheels, and it was possible for automakers to get more creative when it came to finding space for a spare. Automakers would stash spares under the trunk floor, under the hood, or under the car itself—wherever there was enough room.

Bristol got more creative than most, though. They stuck the spare inside its own special cavity inside the front fender itself.

Bristol 404 – with novel spare wheel storage solution. pic.twitter.com/2coq3hJAqx

— Tim Pitt (@timpitt100) July 27, 2016

A British Solution

If you’ve never heard of Bristol, that’s little surprise. The company was an incredibly obscure British automaker, spawned from the Bristol Aeroplane Company. The manufacturer had learned a painful lesson from World War I—when the armistice hit in 1918, aircraft orders quickly dried up and it was lumbered with a huge workforce with little to do. Eager to avoid the same situation after World War II, the company established an automotive division in 1945 and began manufacturing vehicles soon after.

The company’s first product was the Bristol 400. Derived from pre-war BMW designs, it had been given a thorough reworking and a drophead body penned by Pininfarina. The 400 debuted in 1947, with hundreds of examples built. Like so many humpbacked designs from the 1930s and 1940s, it stored the spare tire on the trunk lid at the rear.

The immediate post-war period was a time of rapid change in the automotive industry, however, and Bristol didn’t rest on its laurels. Where the 400 had a very classical, 1930s-style body, the company would soon move on to the more advanced 401, 402, and 403.

However, it was the 1953 Bristol 404 coupe that really made things interesting. It boasted sleek good looks, somewhat aping the lines of the contemporary Aston Martin DB2/4. With up to 125 horsepower in a chassis weighing just 2200 pounds, it was quick, too.

The Bristol 404 was the first model to pioneer the fender storage solution. This example is up for sale at SLJ Hackett.

Just 51 examples of the Bristol 404 were ever built. This was typical for the low-volume British automaker.

Best of all, though? The Bristol 404 pioneered a unique new feature. It stashed the spare tire in a hidden compartment in the front fender. The contemporary Bristol 405 would pull the same trick as well.

The spare tire lived on the passenger side, with the opposite fender compartment stashing the car’s battery. It’s worth noting that the tire was on the left side of the vehicle, since the driver sat on the right in the British-market Bristols.

This design choice had positive effects on weight distribution, keeping these heavy components inboard of the car’s wheelbase. The spare tire and battery also roughly balanced each other out on each side of the vehicle.

Like so many other automakers, Bristol’s naming schemes were not particularly creative. As it continued to step through the 400s range to designate its fine luxury automobiles, it continued to use the same hiding place for the spare tire. The 410 and 411 continued the trend into the 1960s, with the tradition running through to the 1980s with the more angular Bristol 412 and 603.

By the 1990s, Bristol was producing the Blenheim. It had continued to iterate on the now-somewhat-dowdy styling of earlier models, and was still largely based on the 603—but it wasn’t completely ignorant of technological change. The Blenheim launched in 1993 with a 5.9-liter Chrysler V8 with fuel injection, and enough power to do the zero to 60 mph sprint in 6.5 seconds. The company didn’t release power figures, only stating in a very British manner that the engine offered “muscular authority.”

By 2000, the company was producing the Blenheim 3. Even in its final facelift, it still featured the unique fender storage hatch for the spare tire.

The End Is Nigh

As the decades went by, Bristol had remained a relatively obscure luxury manufacturer. Each subsequent model was built in limited numbers, hitting the low three-digit range at best. The company changed hands a few times, but managed to keep lumbering on.

Sadly, though, Bristol’s unique quirk would not last forever, and neither would the company. The company’s last big hurrah was the Bristol Fighter. Debuting in 2004, it paired the Dodge Viper’s 525 horsepower V10 engine with a retro-modern gullwing couple bodyshell of Bristol’s own design.

Sadly, the Fighter abandoned the tradition of fender-stashed wheels to put the full-size spare in the trunk instead. The model remained in production to 2011, when Bristol went into administration.

The company’s assets were later bought out by a group known as Kamkorp. It hoped to revive the Bristol name with a BMW-powered roadster called the Bullet. The model showed up at the 2016 Goodwood Festival of Speed, sadly lacking an interesting space to stash the spare wheel. Ultimately, Bristol was wound up for good in 2020, with the Bullet never entering production.

Bristol’s unique design choice made plenty of sense in the 1950s. It allowed for the spare wheel to be stored in an out-of-the-way location that didn’t compromise the usual cargo areas or spoil the lines of the vehicle. It also helped Bristol to achieve 50:50 weight distribution as an aid to handling.

However, Bristol was pretty much the only company out there doing this, and likely for good reason. For a start, car wheels have grown larger over the years. It would be significantly less practical to try and stash a modern 20-inch wheel—or larger—into the fender well of a modern car. Beyond that, there are issues around crash safety—it’s not ideal to have a big metal wheel sitting in an area that should probably be crumpling up to absorb energy in a crash.

Bristol’s fender wheel storage will thus remain as one of those rare automotive curios of the 20th century. Perhaps one day, someone will figure out an even stranger place to stash a spare wheel. Don’t hold your breath, though. Few automakers out there could ever outweird Bristol.

Image credits: Bristol, SLJ Hackett, Car and Classic, Charles01 – CC-BY-SA 3.0, Martin Pettitt – CC BY 2.0, Brian Snelson CC BY 2.0, Späth Chr, public domain