Bristol's Chrysler Engines

[Claude]

In 1995 I bought an engineless LHD 405 from Jim Rogers of New Baltimore Michigan who used to work for Chrysler in a small department that was devoted to their relationship with Bristol Cars. He said that the sales volume to Bristol was less than a single Chrysler car dealership, but the company found the engineering brilliance to be worth maintaining the relationship. He cited one issue related to the early V8 engine where Chrysler had about 40 engineers on it, and when they visited Filton to check out what Bristol had done, they found two blokes with slide rules who were doing more than Chrysler's 40 man team. After that, Chrysler cut a deal in which Bristol would get all the performance stuff they wanted at standard cost, provided Bristol passed on their R&D for free. Chrysler deemed it valuable enough to staff it, and Jim told a number of delightful stories about his visits with Tony Crook and company. For a Michigan boy, England, pubs, fast cars and eccentric ex-race drivers is exotic stuff.

Jim had no reason to deceive. He was retired from Chrysler and was telling stories in a garage as I loaded the 405 on a trailer for the long haul home. What it suggests is that Bristolised may not mean after the engines arrived in Filton that they were changed by Bristol for the 407 to 412+ cars, but that Bristol engineers suggested changes, they were made to the Chrysler product line and then provided to Bristol. It may be that some of the police specials and hot rod parts came compliments of British engineering.

The non-derivative report says Bristol was very important to Chrysler, far more important than the sale of motors would merit. It says that Bristol engineering was superior, and because they provided it to Chrysler with no charge, they got first class handling.

This would suggest that there is more to the story than marketing hype as alleged.

Claude