[Bristol Superleggera]
How did Bristol rocket from the old-school 400 to the Aerodyne age? The answer: Bristol Superleggera. We drive one of eight ever made, once the personal car of Touring boss himself, Carlo Felice Bianchi Anderloni
Words EMMA WOODCOCK Photography JONATHAN JACOB
So much is familiar aboard the Bristol Superleggera. The crisp, direct steering, the light flooding the cabin, the smooth ride that rises above minor imperfections in the road. All evoke the popular 401 Saloon, a model that elevated the profile of this highly-regarded, long-established aerospace manufacturer and helped bring the marque to the attention of the discerning car buyer. But the Superleggera isn’t a mimic. It’s a trailblazer. Constructed by Milanese coachbuilder Carrozzeria Touring to a brief by HJ ‘Aldy’ Aldington – salesman extraordinaire and the man behind Bristol’s post-war adoption of BMW 328 engineering – the 1948 saloon wears high-tech haute couture. One of eight, its body design taught Bristol Aeroplane Company how to build a modern motor car.
Not that UMC 315 got down and dirty itself. Only Touring’s original 1947 prototype attended the Bristol factory as a classroom aid, test vehicle and eventual styling buck. This car – chassis 401/206 – is one of seven 1948-made offspring, built on newer 401 chassis to translate Superleggera’s tailoring from bespoke to made-to-measure. Vitally, the 1947 shape and structure made it through almost untouched, so this racing red starlet struts the very same stuff that inspired Bristol.
Though its BMW mechanicals were still on the post-war pace, by 1946 it became clear that the 400’s localised take on Thirties 327 bodywork was so last season. Keen to start sales, the company pressed ahead with production, but the search for a more contemporary style was on.
Aldy knew just where to find it: Italy. Grabbing a pair of prototype 400 rolling chassis, he engaged two of the most prominent Carrozzerie and briefed them to produce rakish, continuous bodywork. One car went to Torinese firm Farina, where it became a body-on-frame convertible that strongly evoked the contemporary Alfa Romeo 6C 2500 Sport Cabriolet, only to meet a frosty reception on its return home. Better luck awaited the second experiment : a sharp-styled saloon by Touring, constructed to Superleggera principles.
The shape stunned, but Bristol was much more interested in how it went together. Come July 1947, soon after the body was completed, Touring co-founder Felice Bianchi Anderloni and son Carlo were invited to BAC headquarters in Filton, Gloucestershire to share their secret. Carlo’s wife Anna acted as translator. Aided by the prototype, which soon shed half its panels for the purpose, the Italians spent the next two months teaching their assembly method to anyone who asked.
It still stuns today. Check out the smoothly all-enveloping coachwork, refined with aerodynamics in mind. Witness the tall, airy glasshouse and the long, sill-covering doors. Inside, you gaze across the uncluttered Streamline Moderne of the cabin, characterised by crisp lines and surprising details. Honed and reinterpreted, each feature would make the leap from Touring to the off-the-peg 401 Saloon. Can you blame Bristol for playing contemporary copycat? For a British marque whose home-grown 400 relied on running boards and separate wings, timber frames and recycled pre-war looks, the Superleggera body was clearly designed for a new era.
Its high-speed driving dynamics were a giant leap forwards too. Where the Bristol-built 400 scuttle-shakes, lists and rolls over rough roads, feeling increasingly heavy and inert under load, the Superleggera provides a taut but far livelier platform for the strong engine and sharp steering so characteristic of early Bristols. Slicing down country lanes, accounting for a brief off-centre dead zone, I can flick the Touring into turns with a precision unlike any early series-production Bristol I’ve tried before, feeling the whole chassis dart into action as soon as the front wheels pivot.
The whole car is fresh and eager, as if I’m piloting a 401 Saloon that’s been on a two-week detox. I hit the brakes and they bite faster and harder; just cracking the over-firm throttle is enough to rouse the torque-rich midrange. There’s always grip to spare, and the telescopic dampers help keep the Superleggera tightly tied to the road. Body roll and pitch still feature – just like its stablemates – but the movements are briefer, smoother and much less likely to overshoot what the suspension can handle.
I’m driving faster and further than I planned, marvelling at how this squat stance and can-do attitude meld with especially high levels of communication and predictability. It’s not the car I imagined. Informed by the stolid 400 and the light, competent but cocooning 401, my preconceptions pictured a capable, willing but undemanding gentlefolk’s express that stopped short of nuanced chatter and sports car attitude. But this car’s got both – and by the bucketful. They pour through a self-controlled chassis, which reports the road without often being distracted by it, and a fluent three-spoke rim.
Already manageable at anything above a crawl, the steering lightens appreciably with speed, then loads up through corners with a winding sensation that yields nuggets of subtle, palm-bumping weight for feedback. It’s quick enough that I rarely cross my hands and, imbued with a pronounced caster response that tugs itself and the whole car straight, it amplifies all the usual benefits that the rack-and-pinion design bestows on Bristols. It also capitalises on the coachbuilt car’s scant body mass and enhanced rigidity to offer twin benefits: more incisive turn-in, and a capacity to change course mid-way through corners.
The secret to these skills lies in Touring’s patented Superleggera construction process, a technique that would shape a generation of Bristols to come. In traditional car body manufacture, a solid timber or metal frame was built atop a separate chassis to support usually steel panelling. It was a laborious, heavy but straightforward approach, dating back to horse-drawn days, which Bristol had employed to create the 400. With its 1936 innovation, Touring offered another way. Still working from a separate chassis, the Superleggera concept shaved weight and gained strength by draping aluminium panels across a cage-like frame.
Formed from a brazed, interconnected series of small-diameter pipes, this detailed but low-mass tubular structure gives a Superleggera body its shape – and connects to the panels above only where necessary. Most of the outer skin simply sits in place, resting upon but not tethered to the tubes below, while the few necessary connection points are mostly formed by swaging. As Aston Martin would later appreciate when it licensed Touring’s method to build the DB4 and DB5 – more than a decade after Bristol – the combination of aluminium panels and aircraft-inspired assembly resulted in a lighter, stronger body than conventional coachbuilding could achieve. From the driver’s seat, it adds up to transformative agility.
Playing with the pedals, I up my enthusiasm and the car starts pivoting and darting about, twirling the chassis round a low-down centrepoint just behind my back, making me feel an ever more integral part of the driving process. The engine adds to the drama, with an instant, scalpel-blade alacrity that grows into a linear and smoothly consistent power curve. Begging me to keep my foot hard down, its performance climbs and climbs until the square-set tachometer is running out of dial and the exhaust note has tightened to an urgent, high-chested wail. It wants revs. It wants to drive like a sports car. And yet it looks how it looks… beautiful. Every Touring line and detail is a work of art, inside and out, so part of me still labours under the belief that I’m about to uncover a fashion-forwards cruiser.
I never do. When the Bristol Superleggera isn’t playing to its athletic strengths, the cabin can be a challenging place to sit. In its attempts to shed weight, Touring equipped its design with scant insulation of any kind, so I’m cooking by the heat emanating from the bulkhead and transmission tunnel, perfumed by gasps of fuel vapour and serenaded by whining gears, squeaking brakes and a range of structural sounds. Bumps make bass-drum thumps and compressions fire off echoing cracks, while corners creak the alloy body like a pressure-strained ship’s hull. Airflow is another enduring challenge. With the windows up, the windscreens fog. Put them down and the outside comes in, wind, rain and all.
Call me a fashion victim – I forgive every flaw. Cooking and clamouring, soggy or stuffy, the Superleggera still has the runway looks and enviable new-age bone structure to render the 400 irrelevant. Which is what the Bristol development team wanted.
Bristol liked what it saw in Touring’s prototype, noting the similarities with its own aerospace construction techniques. Superleggera was their way forwards. Whirlwind months followed, the company retaining the prototype to help create full-scale plywood templates and a replica bodyshell. Stylists and engineers now stepped in to make the shape more ‘Bristol’, using plasticine to round out its corners, choosing new lights as well as developing more effective full-width bumpers. The 401 Saloon’s exterior design gradually emerged – but that was only half the battle.
Rigorous road and workshop testing exposed the Bristol Superleggera’s every ergonomic foible, and not one would be let through to series production. By the time the 401 Saloon made its late 1948 public debut, its personality had been transformed. Heat and sound insulation were everywhere, with vibration dampening materials liberally applied to the doors and floors, while redesigned bulkheads and wheel arches liberated increased interior space. Bristol was finally building the stylish, soothing executive express it had always planned.
Aldy had called it right. But he never reaped the full reward. Though the three Aldington brothers (Aldy, Don and Bill) had been integral to planning and developing the 400, then securing the new styling directions, their links with Bristol drastically reduced in April 1947. It wasn’t all bad news, though. Stepping back to car sales, HJ secured himself the sole concession to sell Bristols in London, including a supply of bare chassis. With the Italian designs he’d commissioned still in his possession, and knowing Bristol wasn’t taking them any further, he hit upon a new plan. He’d sell both styles to order, underpinned by 401 running gear.
Priced high and offered only to foreign buyers – a tool of the postwar ‘export or die’ policy to inject cash into the British economy – the £2350 Bristol Superleggera met a modest market. After despatching a first 401 to Touring in early 1948, the Aldingtons followed up with six more rolling chassis that August, including UMC 315. Resplendent in metallic blue with cord upholstery, the finished 401/206 emerged into the Italian sunshine in 1948, where it remained for a hectic few months. As the man himself later recalled, the Bristol acted as Carlo Anderloni’s personal car, served as a Mille Miglia recce vehicle and, following a refresh into its present Rosso Corsa with leather upholstery, starred on the Touring stand at a motor show in Milan.
An engine swap paused the action in June 1949. Back at Bristol headquarters, with 1455 miles showing on the odometer, UMC 315 surrendered its original 85B motor, in favour of an up-to-date 85C with matching transmission. Both transplants remain in the car today. It returned to Italy soon after, was sold to Switzerland, then disappeared for decades, until the Zweimüller family uncovered it in a Geneva scrapyard. Renowned restorers by trade, they’d spent three years restoring 401/206 to its present glory. The classic car world took notice: the Bristol received an invitation to the 1997 Villa d’Este concours, where it was reunited with Carlo Anderloni. The meeting was immortalised in film, and made the front cover of the designer’s 2004 biography Il signor Touring.
What better way to commemorate a career? The Bristol Superleggera is such a rare blend of visual and tactile delights. How the purplish-black sun visors hinge about filigree pipes is just as impressive as the way its straight-six flings us down the road, feeling so much sharper than the Bristol norm. Keen, clean handling and copious feedback share my affections with the metallic mirror-image arc that turns each door pocket into an elongated cat’s eye. But undoubtedly, its greatest legacy is the car it became: the 401. Learning every lesson the Touring design could teach – and constructed via the Superleggera method, used under licence – the first of the Aerodynes was Bristol’s smash hit. More than 600 401s had sold by 1953, rising past 900 when you include the related 402 and 403. And it all started here.
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