[Claude]

My interest in Bristols was different, more left brain. We decided to move to New Zealand, and at the time RHD cars in NZ were 2.5x the price of the same LHD car in the USA. I was into classic Alfa 2-seaters, but with a young child, saw we needed a back seat. The only British classic car that had a reasonable mechanical reputation was the Bristol.

So I located a 405 drophead whose owner, Peter Moes lived about ten miles from me. He was into Arnolt Bristols, but due to some disagreement with Mike DiCola was not able to buy an Arnholt transmission directly. He said that if I bought the transmission, he would swap his 405DH (with a transmission!) along with a 405 parts car. We did the deal and I ended up with a true barn find. I took it to a Connecticut car restorer and began to pour money into it.

I joined the BOC (club) and was sent the registry list. I began to notify the club of cars in the USA that were not on the list, and after the 3rd notification, Bob Charleton, the BOC registrar, sent me a fancy plaque naming me the North American Registrar. I made up a checklist that asked the usual questions about the car, its history and its market value, including when it was last sold and if it was for sale. Dangerous.

So when I asked about a Virginia 409 in perfect original and well-maintained shape, whose value was about $15,000 at the time, and the owner said he would sell for $7,000, I wrote it down. An hour up the freeway, it clicked and I rang back to make sure I got the number right. Yes, he would sell for that price. So I turned around, wrote him a cheque and asked him to have it ready for collection in a month. In the US at the time, one could register a classic car in the state of Rhode Island without the car being present or any proof other than a bill of sale, so a month later I flew down with registration plates, collected the car and drove it home. I finally sold that car about five years later in New Zealand, having reupholstered the leather seats, but otherwise needing to do very little.

Next, I got word of a LHD 405 that was about to be chopped into a hot rod in Detroit. I had a meeting out there, so I drove (about 1,000 miles) instead of taking a plane. Showed up at the meeting with a Chevy Suburban and a 20 foot car trailer. Since I was their most successful and profitable contractor, they raised an eyebrow but said nothing. The car had no paint, the power-train was gone, and the floor had been cut out and installed in an Arnolt Bristol. The seller had retired from Chrysler where his account was to keep Tony Crook happy (I confirmed this with Tony). When he bought the car the motor had already been removed by the previous owner in Texas. I paid $1,200 for it and towed it to my grandfather's farm. I took the floor from the 405 parts car (that had been wrecked), but never found a power train. When I moved to New Zealand, the farm was vandalised so I rang the closest collector and offered it free if he would collect it in 24 hours. Last I heard it was sold to a collector in Paris (France).

That summer, we decided to take a vacation in Washington State, so I looked on the registry and found a LHD 410. I offered the same $7,000 that I had paid for the 409, and the seller accepted. Bought the car sight unseen. I did not tell my wife, but arrived a week before she was to arrive with our daughter. Collected the car and took the seller's advice to only run it on avgas. By that time the US had blended petrol and the alcohol dissolves a lifetime of gunk that it deposits into the carb. In one week I put on new tyres, new exhaust, lots of other new bits, and (only in America), took it to Earl Scheib, famous for the $100 paint job. The guys in the shop loved the car, so instead of the quick wipe, tape and paint, they kept working after quitting time. I kept buying them pizza, and they kept sanding, filling, taping and prepping. By 11 p.m. I had a newly painted car for $120. They painted it a metallic blue and it looked surprisingly good. Filling the tank was always a mission, as it is not entirely legal for an airport to fill the tank of a car. I would give them my pilot license to record, and they would record the car, err. plane, as a Bristol with the wing number taken off the ID plate N7310V or something like that. Finally, the day came to collect the family at SeaTac. Driving down the freeway from Bellingham WA without thinking I pulled into a petrol station to fill the tank. Five miles from the airport, the car died. The carb was completely full of gunk. I had to hitch a ride and rent a car. Next day, I showed my bemused wife the "surprise", having bought a ten gallon plastic racing fuel cell that I installed in the boot. Cleaned out the carb and got her running. I never got it quite right though, and during that trip the occasional popping of the carb and wiping down with q-tips became the roadside drill (including once in a three-mile tailback waiting for the ferry to the Olympic peninsula). The car performed brilliantly other than this minor glitch, and we took it above the timberline, out in the eastern desert and all sorts of interesting places. After the family left I had the tank boiled out and the car was set for running on normal fuel. Sold it to a banker who had it restored properly by the factory (replacing my $120 paint job with a proper Bristol one) and last I heard it was back in New York City, not far from where its first owner, Elliot Gant of Gant shirt fame first drove it.

We moved to New Zealand with three cars. The 405DH, the 409 and a 411-S1. The buyer of the LHD 410 contacted me in NZ, having got the Bristol bug, and he bought the drophead in as-is condition as well as the 40' container that it was stored in (and had been shipped in from the USA). Given my location on an island, it made more sense for me to prepare the car to be shipped in the container (tying everything down) than to send the car and baskets of parts to Auckland for packing in a 20 footer. The drophead went back to the Bristol factory and was restored for an astonishing sum. The banker kept this as his England car, in effect getting a new 1955 car.

The 409 (the Duchess, the first 409 made according to Tony Crook) continued giving good service and I kept it in a lock up in Auckland as our town car. She even joined the BOC on their down under trek. However, at one point the garage rang to say that someone had written "wash me" in the dust on the paint, so I was on the next ferry, brought it back to the island and put it up for sale. In a bidding war, it sold for $35,000 to a buyer whose hobby was making guitars. He redid the woodwork, repainted it the original blue and eventually sold it. I believe it is still in NZ.

So that left me with the 411. While living in the states and still registrar, I was told of a Bristol 408 that supposedly in a car restoration shop all of ten miles up the road I lived in (but on the other side of a state line). It took a year for me to get the time to drive up, only to discover in the weeds a 411-S1. No idea how it came in legally (at the time there was a 25-year minimum on imports), but there it was in very sad shape. Abandoned during a divorce case, the owner had signed the title over to the shop in liue of the storage charges. The shop said that if I paid the $1,200 in storage, it was mine. So I towed it directly to my restoration place to sit beside the 405 DH, where the money flow intensified. The chassis was more rust than steel and it required major work. The rear boot had to be completely rebuilt. He took out and beautifully painted the engine, although it never ran right and in NZ I turned out to need a NZ$7,000 rebuild. He had the transmission rebuilt, but it was done wrong as well, and I now have a replacement collected but not installed. The car had a new Webasto electric sunroof installed, but when the car arrived in NZ, the oafs put a huge booster on the battery to start it and fried the electronics. Of course Webasto had changed the design, so the roof does not open and I cannot get the right replacement. The aluminium body was walnut-shell blasted, the panels properly rebuilt by a shop using an English wheel to shape the aluminium, and the body was properly repainted by one of the best shops in New England. However, we ran out of time, so we stopped when it still needed two weeks of long-block sanding. Instead I had them put a top coat of good paint in an unsellable colour (from a 1974 Ford van, sort of a metallic brown) to ready it for the NZ transport. Once in NZ I came across one of the top upholsterers in NZ who had decided to go back to university for an art degree, who needed cash. He reupholstered the car in the most beautiful multi-toned leather. Since this was to be a keeper rather than a factory new look, I then bought real Persian carpet that I used to replace the sad baby blue Wilton carpet that had been home to smelly mice. Finally, the car went to get its first-time-registered licensing inspection. The replaced steel failed the required VIN inspection because it did "not look factory", and the shop wanted $20,000 to cut apart a perfectly good chassis to pass. While in the shop a customer lost control of her car and bashed in the front guard I gave up. Another shop was able to pull out the damage and get it ready for repainting, but in doing so the beautifully newly chromed bumpers were damaged and will need to be redone. So, fed up, I hauled it home and parked it in the garage where it sits today, taking the occasional unregistered spin on the back roads when police are not around. I wonder if it will ever get on the road in NZ, or if I would be smarter to take it back to the USA where they have less draconian standards for old cars.

And that's my Bristol story.