Gentlemen in tweed jackets who smoke pipe tobacco, rejoice! Bristol Cars is back in business after a fairly long hiatus. The first car the company has produced in almost half a decade is called the Bullet and would you look at how magnificently cool it is?
Despite the Britishness of its name and place of birth, the awe-inspiring bodyshell of the Bullet has been designed by a design house in Italy. Which one? Hell knows, Bristol Cars has yet to make that information public. Save for the cheap-looking alloy wheels, the carbon fiber-built exterior is sublime.
The gracious tailfins are definitely inspired by the Alfa Romeo BAT concept cars, yet the bite-the-back-of-your-hand beautiful Bullet has a certain Britishness to it. Even the name is inspired by a biplane from 1920.
Surprisingly, the four-wheeled Bristol Bullet has a lesser top speed than the interwar biplane: 155 mph (250 km/h) versus 170 mph (270 km/h). That’s not because the engine isn’t up to the job of propelling the 2,425-pound (1,100-kilogram) as fast as possible. The engine is an N62B48 V8 from BMW which, as I’m sure you know, comes with an electronic speed governor.
Be that as it may, 155 mph in a car that’s 1.2 meters tall and has that joke of a windscreen is plenty enough for me, thank you. Thanks to 370 horsepower, the 4.8-liter V8 is able to hurl the Bullet to 62 mph (100 km/h) in 3.8 seconds. Not bad at all for a car with roughly the same footprint as a Jaguar F-Type.
Pricing for the 70th anniversary model of Bristol Cars Limited isn’t available at the present moment, yet word on the street is £250,000 should be enough to buy one of the 70 units that will ever be built. Each and every example of this rarefied breed is going to be produced in Chichester, the United Kingdom.
If you want one, get your ass off that chair and go to Kensington in London because that’s the only place where you can order a Bullet.
After a 1:43 scale model of a Ferrari 250 GTO sparked Mircea's interest for cars when he was a kid, an early internship at Top Gear sealed his career path. He's most interested in muscle cars and American trucks, but he takes a passing interest in quirky kei cars as well. Full profile
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