Bristol Fighter V10 S first drive

Enter Simon Draper, one of the UK’s most dedicated car collectors and boss of London-based Palawan Press, publisher of some of the most beautiful and expensive automotive titles ever produced. He’d bought a Bristol Fighter in December, and after a few teething troubles had set about running it in.

When that was done, he agreed to make it available for an Autocar test, knowing that if we couldn’t test his car (chassis number eight) we’d stand little chance when the company had just built its 10th Fighter, and several of those were prototypes.

"You’ll have to take the car as you find it," said Draper, as we opened the garage the Fighter shares with at least a dozen other cars at his place on the south coast. But it soon emerged that like Draper’s other cars, this one was immaculate.

The moment your eye falls on the Fighter, you know it’s different; it’s several inches taller than other GT cars and narrower – in fact a full 115mm narrower than the Dodge Viper which provides the most important mechanicals.

Bristol, once an aeroplane manufacturer, has always seen things differently to other fast-car manufacturers. It wants nothing to do with downforce, which brings implicit drag, but designs for stability and streamlining and an absence of lift, so the car’s performance above 120mph puts others in the shade.

The body height and its narrowness – allied with thoughtful details like a turning circle which seems miraculous on a car with such large (and uniformly sized) tyres – are all about making the Fighter a day-to-day proposition. Which Simon Draper agrees it can be. Above all, the car is beautiful. The lines are far from avant-garde, but they have a symmetry and a balance which few can match. The car looks far better in the metal than in these photographs.

What it doesn’t seem, when you raise the driver’s door, slide your rump across the wide sill and climb into the cockpit, is small. This is possibly because as you settle into the large leather bucket seat your backside is less than a foot ahead of the rear tyre’s leading edge, but six or seven feet from the front wheel. Your fairly high seating position does not mean cramped headroom, and you have a fine view over the sculpted bonnet, the kind of view which constantly conveys to an owner the value of the car.

There are aircraft allusions all over the place: modular dash fittings for the main console components, an array of overhead instruments (including an engine hour meter) overhead, and the side windows have small opening sections like a fighter plane’s.

Above all, there’s space. Headroom, shoulder-room, a big footwell with large, widely spaced pedals, a decent-sized wheel and a feeling of airiness, because there’s a wide loading deck (above a full-size spare) reaching out behind you, below that elegant, castellated rear window. It’s a fine place to be and, importantly for Bristol, it’s like no other car you know.

There’s a familiar, mighty rumble to the engine as it starts. The Chrysler V10 has lowly beginnings, but nothing can disguise the low-stressed reliability and the potential. Bristol still uses the 8.0-litre engine, which in standard tune has more power and torque than the latest 8.3-litre version.

For a mechanism that disperses such mighty torque, the clutch pedal feels light. Bites strongly, though, and with no more than a whiff of throttle the car bolts as if it were a featherweight. No doubt about the four second 0-60mph time either: the Fighter easily achieves that speed without a gearchange.

The performance is simply immense. Huge thrust is available at any speed, in any gear but sixth (which pulls around 40mph per 1000rpm) as long as the engine’s turning at about 2000rpm. The red line is somewhere around 6000rpm, but there is really no need to rev this one beyond 5000rpm, because it’s smoother down there and there’s so much urge in the next ratio that generating all that piston speed seems futile.

Bristol has improved on the standard Viper shift by making the throws shorter and inclining the lever toward you. It’s never the swiftest of shifts, and the gear-planes are so close that they take some learning, but it certainly is satisfying. I loved it.

The car is a safe handler, too, benign when cornering hard and long enough in the wheelbase to resist unscheduled tail-out stuff. There’s a stability control to make sure it doesn’t go too far, if you’re brave enough. I wasn’t. You stroke this car along, feeling the thrust and gather in mighty units of distance with every gearchange.