Here’s Why I Bought a Bristol

Story by Brandes Elitch

I have learned over time, mostly the hard way, that when an extraordinary thing happens in life, you must seize the moment because you won’t get a second chance. You could not call this a rational or logical decision and possibly not a good financial decision; it was clearly an emotional decision, but there was nothing to be done but to pack up the car with the Motoring Dog. I told him, “Stan, let’s do this,” and he wagged his tail.

Earlier this week, I bought a Bristol. To be specific, a 1964 model 408, production number 28. I believe that about 83 cars were made in this series. Over the last 30 years I have collected multiple Citroens, Jaguars, and Chrysler Imperials, among other things, but never really thought about Bristol all that much over all that time.

How did this happen?

Well, it was all due to a British automotive writer named LJK Setright, or LJKS for short, who wrote in the British magazine CAR, which I read sporadically (because it was hard to find on a newsstand, remember those?) many, many years ago. His first column was in 1970; his last column was in 1999.

He died in 2005 at age 74. He has been called by multiple writers “the finest motoring writer who ever lived, and surely the most intellectual.”

Robertas Parazitas wrote an obituary fifteen years later for a website called “Drive to Write.” He called Setright “a polymath, autodidact, wordsmith, bebop clarinetist, classicist, libertarian, controversialist, modern day Jehu, dandy, Ba’al teshuva.”

Read this review

Writer Gavin Green wrote, in a recent column for The Intercooler, that Setright wrote about cars “with a poetic elegance not seen before, or since, with intellectual rigor underpinned by an exhaustive knowledge of engineering, history, and classical culture.”

At CAR magazine, he is remembered as the most distinguished contributor “who elevated automotive journalism to a high literary artform, sprinkling his copy with references to Kipling, Hebrew sages, and Virgil, among details of engineering, suspension geometry and tire compounds.”

In an obituary for the Irish Times, writer Pat Comyn said, “He was a man of firm convictions who hated speed limits, public transport, and environmentalists, and loved Bristol cars and Honda motorcycles.”

His interest was always with engineering innovation and/or elegant simplicity of design, and a comment by writer “realspin” at fleet first” says it all: “In a way I wish I hadn’t met LJKS or even ever read him because he exposed so many of today’s car journalists for the one-dimensional pretenders that they are.”

Somewhere, sometime, many years ago, I must have read LJKS and committed to memory his pronouncement that the Bristol was the best car in the world. I never even questioned his judgment, not for a moment, but of course finding a Bristol here in the US would be almost impossible, as they were never sold here, and of course very few were made in the first place, and then there is the matter of time, that in this case almost sixty years has gone by since it was created. But I never forgot that column.

I just filed this information away for a few decades, never really giving it a second thought until two weeks ago, when one became available right in my backyard, so to speak.

LJKS wrote a book called A Private Car: An Account of the Bristol. It was awarded the Montagu of Beaulieu Trophy by the Guild of Motoring Writers in 1999. The Amazon review for the book, which appears to be completely unavailable, says “It is written in the established Setright style, which is meant to be highly literate, comfortably personal, appropriately technical, adequately anecdotal, mildly scholarly, gently judgmental, and entirely honest.” I suppose I will have to find a copy somewhere, even if it means not eating for a month since it cost 300 British pounds when released and likely a few times that now. He also wrote a second, much smaller separate book, Bristol Cars and Engines, in 1974.

As you may know, Bristol Cars was part of Bristol Aircraft, which played a big role in the air war of WW II. At one time it employed 50,000 people. Around 1960 the British government decided to combine all the UK aircraft manufacturers, and the car business was spun off. There is an active Bristol Owners Club today, with over 500 members.

After this event, I think I am done with finding cars, at least in this lifetime.

But I Digress

In thinking about this, and about the effect that LJKS had on me, it got me to thinking about our automotive journalists here in the US, and if any have come close to LJKS in terms of accomplishment.

The answer is: clearly not, with perhaps one exception, but that is not to say that we have not had some influential and important writers.

The first that comes to mind, and the first I read growing up, was Tom McCahill. I would ride my bike to the public library in South Orange, NJ, then located in an old Victorian house, and in the basement, I would find old issues of Mechanix Illustrated magazine. He wrote a column there from 1946 up until the mid-sixties, contributing mover 600 road tests. His writing style was iconic, for example here is a quote about the 1959 Imperial:

“This doll was as loaded as an opium peddler during a tong war. Swivel seats make it as easy to get into as a floating crap game with fresh money. On the 31-degree banked turns, the big Imp hung in there like oil going through a hose.”

Or another example, on the 1957 Buick: “This Buick takes corners like a fat matron trying to get out of a slippery bathtub.”

Prior to Uncle Tom, auto manufacturers never lent their cars out for independent testing, but he changed all that. He was so instrumental that after his death in 1975, Mechanix Illustrated never publicly acknowledged his death and they did not want to admit that he was gone and even ran a column called “Tom McCahill Reports” that was ghostwritten by his stepson!

Around 1956 I started getting a weekly allowance of 25 cents which allowed me to get a copy of Motor Trend at the same price. A few years later, I “graduated” to a subscription for Road & Track. But in college, I found that the university bookstore had a copy of the British magazine MotorSport edited by William Boddy. I was mesmerized by the cars, which were quite different from what the American magazines featured, and also by the small ads in the back. In 1966 I found an ad by Dan Margulies, an old car dealer located in the Queens Gate Place Mews section of London, and I bought a Lagonda V12, which I kept for 41 years. That was the beginning of my infatuation with the British magazines, later reading Classic and Sportscar and Thoroughbred and Classic. At some point they got to be expensive, around ten dollars a copy, but then, almost overnight, the magazine stores disappeared. Tragic.

Readers subscribed to CAR magazine, or bought it on the newsstand, in part because of LKJS’s columns. And it turned out that during this period, there was another iconic British writer who wrote a monthly column, starting in 1953 and ending in the early nineties. He was the “Continental Correspondent “for MotorSport magazine, writing mostly about his travels in the world of motorsport, which was coincidentally the Golden Age of Motorsport. He became the elder statesman of British racing writers. His name was Denis Jenkinson, aka DSJ. He is most famous for being the navigator for Stirling Moss in the 1955 Mille Miglia, one of the greatest drives in history. DSJ meticulously prepared by learning every corner of the entire thousand miles and committing it to a big roll of notes which he unfurled as the race went on, to guide Moss to upcoming obstacles. He passed away in 1996 after writing over a dozen books on motorsport, all of which are very collectible today. It is said that he provided inspiration not just for motorsport enthusiasts, but also for a generation of Formula One reporters. I don’t believe there was any other motoring journalist who wrote a monthly column for forty years, and I am pretty certain there will never be another one like DSJ.

Other famous writers were Ken Purdy, but this was before my time, and of course John Bond at R&T. We cannot forget our own version of LJKS: Griff Borgeson, another great writer, who was profiled in VeloceToday in July 2019.

In the spring of 1962, a bombshell was dropped on automotive readers, a new high-quality publication launched by Scott Bailey named Automobile Quarterly. He called it “a cross between The New Yorker and Encyclopedia Britannica in the world of auto mania.” I call it the Gold Standard, and today I tell people that reading VeloceToday with 12 new articles every month is like getting AQ virtually! VT is truly in a class by itself, and I cannot think of any other publication that is similar.

People my age might suggest another automotive writer: David E. Davis. In fact, if he was still alive, he would suggest it. He is most famous for his road test of the BMW 2002, but if you want a perhaps more realistic perspective, consider this column written many years ago by one of my favorite writers, Jack Baruth. It has been reproduced many times in many places because it is so well written. RIP David E. Davis, Jr | The Truth About Cars https://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2011/03/rip-david-e-davis-jr/

Today, aside from Jack Baruth, I would say that The Oracle is PMD, Peter de Lorenzo, who publishes a website weekly at www.autoextremist.com. I read it every week, and if you are interested in what is going on right now in Detroit, you should too.

One of my favorite regular monthly writers is in fact not a professional writer at all, in fact, he works in the insurance industry. He has written a column for many years at the website Curbside Classic and his name is Joseph Dennis.

I still buy automotive books every month, even though I have a large library of books which I have not yet read and will likely not live long enough to read. But what passes for “writing” on the web is mostly drivel, written by people I have never heard of, who are gig writers for websites I have never heard of, many of them driven by advertising dollars and not much else. Aside from being drivel, they are in many cases factually incorrect, which is even worse.

I am glad I had the chance to read LJKS and Uncle Tom McCahill. They changed my life.