Droppings from the Heritage Trust

Why doesn’t my Bristol have matching numbers?

We have only been able to look through quite a small fraction of the enormous Bristol Cars Ltd and Car Division archives. All sorts of distracting treasures turn up which interfere with us getting on with our sacred task of archiving, indexing and curating.

But I thought I’d share this newsflash with you; much attention is paid by the posh end of the motor trade about matching numbers. I have unearthed the Bristol Car Division engine rebuild book which records the engine numbers dates and types that were rebuilt in the Works, where they came from and where they ended up. Some rebuilds seemed to take a few days, others weeks and weeks.

It seems to me that you would get an already rebuilt exchange engine pronto if your 2 L needed a rebuild, rather than having the engineless car waiting around several weeks in the works.

A lot of 2 Litre engines were rebuilt after several years, perhaps related to rallying and racing exploits, (or perhaps to heavy footed owners?). Many were likely upgraded during the rebuild so 100A became 100B, to 100AB, to 100B2.

The book does go onto the V8s, but there were many less of these recorded as rebuilt. Were they inherently less stressed than the 2 Litres? Were the owners less competitive? Or were the V8s so unsophisticated that the village garage could readily attend to them? Engine block supremo Jon Bradburn has been incorporating these numbers into his magnum opus of the engine register, and I’m sure we will turn up more and more data on this fascinating story.

The late great Tony Crook is on record as having got his hands on no 5,  one of the three 450 Le Mans engines (nos 3,5, and 7) on 5/11/57, before he ever became Sir George’s partner. No 3 went to the Service dept, and no 7 is recorded as going to (or instead of?) “fitters 100A/3159”.
Their destiny is unknown. So look under your bonnet, perhaps one of them is yours?

More to follow, I dare say…
Yours in Bristol
Stefan Cembrowicz