Bristol is one of those companies you probably never heard of but you should, because of it has one of the quirkiest stories in the field of automotive manufacturing.
The company is mostly known for its mythical levels of secrecy surrounding its products, with its former boss Tony Crook taking the credit. Crook was running the company for nearly half a century in a rather unusual way; He was famous for not selling his cars to people he didn’t trust and hated passionately everyone in the automotive media.
The Fighter was the last Bristol made, and like other models of the company, no one really knows how many of them were ever made. With the V10 powertrain of a Dodge Viper, Bristol claimed the one thousand hp figure (1012hp to be exact) from a turbocharged version of the Fighter in 2006. The regular versions had the same amount of power as the donor car. The company recently announced its return, using BMW‘s powertrains.
The latest info coming from the owner of the blue example driven by XCAR’s Alex Goy in the video says that only nine Fighters were ever made by hand, making this gullwing oddity one of the rarest automobiles on earth.
Is it really so special? I’ll let you decide.