ARNOLT-BRISTOL BOLIDE
Safe to say that, following a painstaking restoration, this Arnolt-Bristol is once again ship-shape. John Simister drives it
Importer’s idea of a sports car for the USA
It used to have a Chevrolet V8 engine. Big flared wheelarches caked in filler and covering chromed wheels with enormous tyres. And squinty headlights useful only for illuminating kerbs. And it was bright red. Yet Bristol chassis number 404/X/3065 was still a rare car of historic importance, which is why it had found itself brought ‘home’ from the US to today’s Bristol Cars emporium in Kensington, to await further developments. ‘Home’? It’s complicated.
It was (almost) home for the chassis, anyway. It had originally left Bristol’s factory in Bristol in April 1954, headed for Bertone in Turin, where it was fitted with a very nonBristol two-seater body. The now-clothed car was then sent to the Warsaw, Indiana, works of SH Arnolt Inc to become an ArnoltBristol, the brainchild of Stanley H ‘Wacky’ Arnolt. He planned to sell 200 of them from his Chicago showroom, mostly in the US, but the tally stopped at 130. It would have been 142 had not 12 gone up in smoke at the works. (Cue on-trend thoughts of a ‘continuation series’…)
The now, and indeed originally, green machine you see here, the 66th ArnoltBristol to be made, is the Bolide version. Bolide: a large meteor that explodes in the atmosphere. That’s a good name for a speedy sports car. While we’re on definitions, Wacky: a man who crossed Lake Michigan in a 13ft boat during heavy fog over treacherous waves, thus earning the nickname. Clearly this car is designed to spring surprises.
ADAM REDDING RUNS a restoration business in Farnham Common, Buckinghamshire. He’ll tackle anything interesting: several E-types, a Dino, a DB5, a Porsche 912 and a Lancia Flaminia Coupé are among recent projects. But he’s particularly knowledgable about Bristols, having done restoration work for the Kensington operation. So when he got wind of the Arnolt, his next project became clear.
With the Arnolt in the workshop, the assessment, and the sleuthing it would generate, began. The idea was to restore the Arnolt back to an originality as forensically accurate as could realistically be achieved, not least to make it eligible for Mille Miglia entry should a future owner so desire, and that meant finding parts for which Adam’s (and my) friend Simon Worland, a stickler for neat detail, happily pitched in.
So, in May 2016, deconstruction of the Arnolt began. With the filler ground away, all that joined the expanded ’arches to the body were just a few easily chopped tackwelds. Now the resulting gaps had to be remedied, and there was also the matter of the heavily reshaped nose section, which needed the reinstatement of the original air intake shape, the removal of the wonky headlight mountings, and the repositioning of the headlights in the air intake.
In fact, the front end’s outer metalwork – the panels are steel – was beyond reasonable redemption, so Gary Pitney at GP Panelcraft made a complete new nose and front-wings assembly, helped by known measurements and photographs. Adam and his team
reinstated correct-shape rear ’arches and remade the bent front section of the bonnet.
That was just the tip of the steelberg. Adam also made new floors, keeping the original tunnel between them, an aluminium honeycomb bulkhead and toeboard as close as possible to the original aircraft-derived material, a new dash panel and new beading around the edge of the cockpit. The doors, sills, bootlid, boot floor and most of the rear outer bodywork are original, as are the inner front wings and the chassis, whose V8 engine mounts had to be expunged.
Then there was the matter of the engine. The V8 found a new home in a friend’s pickup and an ad in the Vintage Sports-Car Club’s newsletter revealed an ex-Grand Prix Cooper-Bristol engine for sale complete with gearbox. Bristol engine expert Mike Robinson, veteran of 100 rebuilds, rendered the engine ready for its new life with around 130bhp, and Bristol parts specialist Spencer Lane-Jones supplied many components.
But not all of them, an Arnolt not being quite as other Bristols. That neat little mesh front grille, for example, was an eBay find. How? ‘There’s a man who has the original 1954 motor show car,’ Adam explains, ‘and he wants to build ten replicas. So he had these grilles made.’ Also found on eBay were new/old-stock Bristol 401 hubcaps at £26 each to adorn the perforated-steel Bristol wheels shod with Michelin X tyres, but the unique handmade Arnolt-Bristol badges for them (from Pamela David Enamels, which already had a pattern from US-based Ed Howell’s restoration of the Arnolt-Bristol prototype) were a little dearer than that. Other badges, including the Bertone ‘b’ on the flanks, came from the US.
There are parts in an Arnolt-Bristol borrowed from other contemporary cars. The steering column is Aston Martin DB2/4, attached to Bristol’s steering rack. The front brakes are Jaguar XK120 apart from the ironlined aluminium drums, made by Wellworthy (cylinder barrels its main speciality) and unique to Bristols. Adam and Simon found a pair at Bristol’s own parts department, just £17.50 each. They had been on the shelf for decades, and the price had never changed.
Then there are the electrics. The Jaguar XK120, again, shares its numberplate light and much switchgear. The warning lights have particular colours – a green and a pale blue – used only in Astons and hard to find. And the missing tri-sector instrument dial was recreated by Simon using one from an early Land Rover but substituting a Morris Eight fuel gauge and carefully bending the needle. A graphics friend then applied the Arnolt Pegasus logo to the centre of the face.
A Bristol 406, decayed beyond redemption, provided many useful parts such as the pedal-box casting and the pedals themselves. ‘It all bolted straight in,’ says Simon, ‘but the pedal positioning seemed wrong. Then we realised an Arnolt has its pedals cranked into the right shape, so we found photographs of how they should be and made these the same. That meant we had to make another new toeboard.’
Worn hardened-steel suspension pivot pins were turned fractionally undersize, new ones being unobtainable, and new phosphorbronze bushes machined to suit. These and the steering rack are lubricated by an Enot’s one-shot oil system. Spax built new bespoke dampers, Radtec made the radiator and the fuel tank (the latter foam-filled to meet FIA regulations), and the original fuel cap was welded to an FIA-spec inner cap with today’s approved thread.
Nearly there… The original, flimsy and ropey seats were made from a single skin of aluminium, so Adam re-made them with a steel frame but to the same shape. His team made the wiring loom too. Myrtle Productions supplied a fine replica steering wheel, back-mounted Lucas P700 headlights took up residence in the front air intake, Simpson Race Exhausts took care of spent gases via a deliciously curvy manifold. And exactly a year after work started, ArnoltBristol number 66 was completed, the unusually detailed combined workshop manual and parts list was closed, the engine was fired up and Wacky ’s creation lived again.
NOW RUN-IN, the rare Arnolt is raring to go and I’m about to take it on its longest run since the resurrection. First impression: how can a sports car look so simultaneously sleek and so lofty? Bertone designer Franco Scaglione, his Alfa Romeo BAT cars yet to appear, had somehow to disguise the tall, BMW-derived straight-six with its three Solex carburettors plonked on top of a longstroke, hemi-head pushrod engine that looks like a twin-cam but isn’t.
Scaglione did this by allowing more than half the front wheels’ height to be revealed under the front valance, by making the bonnet very ‘crowned’ with an air-scoop for good measure, and then causing the waistline to fall steeply towards the rear haunches to reduce the depth of the body sides. The result is a car apparently in a state of permanent visual acceleration, with power ready to burst out of its bonnet.
I said this is a Bolide. That’s a term that emerged after the launch, because the original handbook describes two versions, designated Standard (pared-back equipment, simple dash, no weather gear, ready to race as was Arnolt’s intention) and Deluxe (plush seats, weather gear, proper Bristol instrument cluster, ineffectual bumpers). This car sits between the two, with the Deluxe’s slightly deeper windscreen, its hood and its sidescreens, but the racy seats and dash. Pure spec but road-usable: that’s the Bolide.
And what a keen thing it is. I’m being gentle at first while I get to know the Bolide’s
behaviour, but the throttle is super-crisp at small openings yet without a trace of snatch. The clutch is light and progressive, the long, cranked gearlever with its Bakelite knob clicks with oily smoothness into its ratioslots. Conducting the Arnolt with driverflattering fluidity is disarmingly easy. Even a double-declutch down into the nonsynchronised first gear is a piece of cake.
So I try a bit harder. Below 3000rpm, more throttle merely brings on dyspepsia. From that crankshaft speed the induction and exhaust notes start to harden, but there’s still a beat, a throb slightly odd in a straight-six. At 3500rpm it starts to clear and the engine to pull harder; at 4000rpm the note is a pure, hard-edged blare and momentum is exploding meteorically. Bolide indeed.
I call time at 5000rpm because I don’t want to be the one to break this engine with its slender bores and fearsome piston speeds, but the claimed 130bhp – correct Arnolt spec, with regular Bristol 404s offering just 85bhp – arrives at 5500rpm according to the handbook. And when it was in Grand Prix tune, this particular engine must surely have ventured well beyond that.
On the motorway, I suspect that no one has a clue what this car is, but they’re impressed with its pace and its vocals. And now we’re heading into the Buckinghamshire countryside, where bumpier roads reveal an impressively all-of-a-piece feel with no shudder or shake. On the sinuous sweeps of Stokenchurch Hill I can get a greater sense of what a 1950s Bristol is like when re-imagined as a lightweight sports car, and it’s all good.
Precise steering, confident straight-line stability, a benign balance but lots of scope for tightening the trajectory on the throttle(s) once settled into a bend: the Arnolt has all these things. It’s a straightforward, talkative, transparent fourwheel drifter, which does what you ask it to do and clearly enjoys every minute. To race one of these would be very entertaining. Even the drum brakes do a confident job once their racing linings are warmed up. They feel a bit wooden before that point, an impression heightened by the brake shoes’ unusually strong pull-off springs, but you soon learn to press harder.
I’ve become thoroughly smitten with the Arnolt-Bristol, but now it’s time to return. Back on the motorway there’s time to take in the front-end bodyscape of curves and ridges and bulges beyond the curved dashboard, whose tri-dial is obscured by my right hand so I might not immediately know if the oil pressure has disappeared, the coolant has boiled or the petrol tank has emptied. I’m compact enough to be looking mostly through the windscreen rather than over it, but back at base I have an oddly numb sensation on my scalp where the wind has been doing its best to deplete what remains of my hair.
I switch off the engine, tug on the leather-wrapped cord that, like an early Mini’s, retracts a rudimentary door-catch. A final glance at a cabin beautifully trimmed in its sparseness, another at the razor precision of the panel gaps, and my Arnolt adventure is over.
This is a car about which few people, at least on this side of the Atlantic, know. That doesn’t include an elderly gentleman who correctly identified it during a turn-round for our action photography, but then he’s owned a Bristol or two in the past.
For this reason of obscurity, Adam, now a bit of an Arnolt expert, doesn’t think there would be much mileage in making some ‘new’ ones, Jaguar XKSS-style. The considerable joy of driving an Arnolt-Bristol will remain a secret shared with few. I’m glad to have been one of them.