Peter Wilson's reminisces of racing Bristols in the 50s

Part 2

We went to Rheims. Tommy Wisdom did not drive because he got burnt some what at Le Mans, and I drove with Jack Fairman. Macklin and Whitehead drove the other one. Rheims you probably do not know very much about because it never got much publicity. It is a twelve hour race, started at midnight,finished at midday and it was before the Grand Prix. It finished midday on the Sunday and the Grand Prix started at three o'clock Sunday afternoon. As a result, the Grand Prix always got a lot of publicity and all the write-ups and photographs, and the twelve hour race very seldom got reported. But it was a very interesting race, particularly the start - a Le Mans start in the dark, flood lights and everything in the grandstand and suddenly going into pitch darkness - very frightening. Graham Whitehead jumped into his car, pressed the starter button, thought it had not started and let his foot off the clutch to have another go. He'd got seven thousand or eight thousand revs on the clock and he sheered something in the final drive, so that was the end of that. However, we got going and about three or four laps later there was great excitement because we were lapping at about four minutes twenty seconds; the Jaguars and Ferraris were lapping at about three minutes twenty seconds and the Panhards and so on were lapping at five minutes twenty seconds, so after four laps we got the small ones and the big ones got us and there was all hell let loose. There were about forty or fifty cars with about fifteen trying to overtake another fifteen, and another fifteen trying to overtake you, and I think there is no doubt about it; at La Mans or Rheims, in that sort of racing, the two litre car is the car to avoid driving, because if you are driving an 1100cc car, you seldom overtake people. You only overtake people in your own class and that is not very often, but you are being overtaken a lot so you use the mirror all the time. If you are driving a Jaguar or a Ferrari, again you are seldom overtaken - only when you are being lapped by your own sized cars - and you are overtaking people all the time: but in the middle- sized cars you are literally overtaking and being overtaken, and the speed difference is quite remarkable. I made some notes on these speeds at Le Mans in 1955. It was reckoned that the Ferrari was doing 181, we were doing just on 150, the quickest DB was 115 and there were Panhards doing 99, so you know that is a hell of a speed difference to get in the dark and even more so if it is wet.

Rheims went quite well in 1953 and we ended up winning the class. It was quite a dramatic race because, in actual fact, the race was divided into three. It was three separate races and alleged to be under general classification, and the big car race was a big drama. There was a Ferrari - I think it was Castellotti - that was in the lead and during the night while it was still dark it started running on sidelights only, because I am pretty certain his dynamo packed up. He came in for a pit-stop and it would not restart. Quite a lot of fuel was upset and the mechanics started pushing the car clear of the fuel. While they were doing that, the driver let in the clutch, started the engine and drove off! It was quite obvious what had been done - the fuel had been upset deliberately so that they bad to push it clear and that was a means of doing a push-start. It was disqualified and Ferrari threatened to withdraw from the Grand Prix on Sunday. However, he did not.

That Grand Prix was fantastic. It was the race where Hawthorn won by about half a second from Fangio, and I was lucky enough to be standing on the motor bridge which was just after the pits. It was quite an incredible race. After Rheims they tour: the cars to Montlhery later that year. I did not get involved in that. They took some records; from one hour at 126 mph up to six hours and six-hundred miles at 115 mph. It all went like clockwork as far as I can gather. They had changed the front end of the car; the headlights had been dropped and faired in and the front end was very much cleaner. The back end was unchanged. For 1954 they changed the back end slightly. They still had two fins, but the bodywork in between used to go down quite steeply so that the fins stuck out. They raised that so that the fins were threequarters filled in, I would say.

For 1954 they decided as far as drivers were concerned to avoid very temperamental drivers, and they got three drivers from the 'Monkey Stable' which some people may remember. It was an amateur set-up that raced MGs and various other small cars like that and they had Jim Mayers who drove with me, Trevor Lyon and Hike Keen who drove together, and Jim, Trevor and Mike were 'Monkey Stable'. The other car was Tommy Wisdom and Jack Fairman and as third driver, we had Jack Brabham who had just come over from Australia and had only been in the country about three months. He was quite bewildered because be couldn't get steaks for breakfast in France: it shook him rigid and he couldn't understand the French.

Rheims 1954. Photo courtesy of Motor Sport

The first year the cars were dark green and they changed to a pale apple-green for 1954, and 1955 they were the same pale apple-green. There was one amusing incident when we got out to Le Mans that year. The fuel tanks were sealed so that you could not refuel illicitly under a certain number of laps and you bad a plombier who came and did what seemed to take an endless time threading a bit of wire through the loops in the filler cap and lead seal, so that you did not cheat. When we got out to the circuit on the day of the race we tried to find our plombier to make sure he knew where the filler caps were and knew exactly what to do. Eventually we sorted him out; he was an enormous great fat man and it was a bit depressing. He said he was the quickest plombler in Le Mans, so we asked him his name and he said: 'Rose Appelation Anjou'! He was a friendly character and really was quite quick considering his size. In 1954 the engines had the six port heads and went quite a lot better.

One amusing bit of trouble we had; I think it must have been 1953 that we ran into it. There was an oil tank that held probably about seven or eight litres of oil with gravity feed to the sump, with the float chamber of a carburetor to keep the sump level right, and the sump was baffled with compartments with non-return valves, and the float chamber fed into one of those compartments. This worked very well but somebody came into the pits during practice having taken the engine up to fairly high revs, put it into neutral, foot off, braked hard coning in. Now, when you braked, oil from that compartment went forward through the non-return valve and the float chamber said: 'Oy! The sump is empty' and put about two to three pints into the sump. When you went off, an enormous cloud of smoke came out because the rode started dipping, It took quite a long time before we sorted out what the trouble was.

In 1954, team spirit was absolutely first class; everybody got on; everybody was very friendly. We enjoyed it and everybody thought things were going to go well so, having had the success at Rheims, there was optimism and altogether it was really most enjoyable. The race went very well as far as we were concerned. We set out to try to lap consistently and at a reasonably fast speed. If you looked at past records, if you went on at that speed I think it would be a miracle if we did not win the class, because it had never been won at that speed before. Some people were going quicker but by past experience they pack up, and they did. We were quite a bit quicker that year. The quickest of the Bristols lapped at 4 minutes 58.8 seconds. That was instead of, what was it, 5 minutes 11 seconds, so quite a significant improvement, and we were timed at 152 on the straight, so it was said. I suspect quite a number of cars were quicker than that but that was the only one of ours that was recorded that year, but I think we were probably quicker. The Frazer-Nash had reportedly done 139 that year, the Jaguars 172, Ferraris l60. We were using 5,800 revs so if necessary, if you had to go faster, you could go up to 6,000. They were maximum reading rev counters so you could know what you had been doing and we never had our maximum read rev counter stick at more than 5,900, and I think Jim Mayors got that on a tow down the straight. Jack Falrman, I think it was, or that car at any rate. was reading over seven on one occasion, but he probably missed a gear change: not screaming it up In the gears.

Now, one of the regulations at Le Mans at that time was that all tools and spares had to be carried on the car, and It was very wet the second half of the race that year and after about two hours, before it started raining, a wiper blade came off the car that I was driving. We had not got a spare wiper blade in the car, so during that rather wet race we were allowed one wiper blade and that was really pretty miserable, particularly at night, and on one occasion, going into Mulsanne with a sharp right-hander at the end of the straight, it was absolutely lashing with rain and one could not see a thing through the windscreen. I actually opened the door so that I could look to see between the windscreen frame and the door frame to see where the corner was. It really was as bad as that. There was another nasty incident coming into Mulsanne. Moss went past me, his brakes failed and he went straight down the escape road; turned round and came back, his headlights full on as one was braking for the corner, with no windscreen wiper, in the dark. It was very nasty there. It was interesting going down the straight. The side windows would suck out quite a bit, and you could literally put your hand between the top of the doorframe and the roof. The side windows were fixed for the first half and hinged at the back, and you could push them open. If you shut those, you got about an extra 150 revs down the .'straight, but the top stuck right out. If you didn't shut them the top didn't suck out quite so much but you lost speed. About half distance we were one, two and three in the class. The opposition had packed up and we just kept going. There was no drama at all until, I think it was two laps before the end, when God knows what, Jack Fairman went and spun the car and dented both front corners. It was a time when he was going very slowly because he was probably looking at his wrist watch, saying: 'How many laps have I got to do?' He did not come into the pits; he just sort of continued and finished with those two dirty great dents. That year the car I was driving spent fifteen minutes in the pits. With refueling every three hours so what is that? Seven stops; 60 it must have worked out over two minutes per stop, which was not bad going. To be continued.

‘Autocar' of 28 July printed in their series 'Pleasure Machines' an article headed 'Bristol fashion' (of course). Peter Wilson's 404 is compared with Harry Warehan's 406Z. The 404 is described as one of the two left hand drive examples made, so we must believe it. It does seem though that these two change hands a lot, or do I only imagine seeing advertisements, for 1hd 404s? Autocar' keeps a straight face when telling us that 'the Bristol designers had seen fit to reduce the 403 chassis by 18 inches when developing the 404 and the result was instability at high speeds' and 'Painstaking handiwork and good detail design are both Bristol hallmarks. The 404 is no exception'. We are reminded that for the cost of one 404 you could have bought three Jaguar Mk Vlls, and they presumably knew where they were going. Be that as it may, they would have gone. Had one purchased three Mk Vlls in 1955 the chances are that one would be left with three rather nasty piles of rust in the garage, whereas he who had invested in a 404 would by now have learnt to keep it pointed in the right direction.

Peter Wilson - in conclusion

In the last two issues, Peter Wilson took us wiith the Bristol racing team to the 1953 Le Mans race in which neither car finished, to Reims the same year where they won the 2 litre class, and back to Le Mans in 1954' to win the 2 litre class and. the team award. We now continue.

The mechanics were absolutely first class. Apart from Percy Kemish there was Stan Ivermee who was also with Bentleys in the old days as well as Percy Kemish. There was Ned Sparks who was the mechanic for my car. I have seen him once or twice over the last few years. He is a Leyland dealer in Chobham, Surrey, now and his son racing Formula Ford, I think it is, or Formula 3; a very nice character. There was one called Evans ind I regret I cannot remember the names of the ether two, but they were extremely good and extremely enthusiastic and there was nothing that they would not do. If they had to work all night before a race, they would do it. Dave Summers, who was responsible for designing the cars, he was always out there. He was very quiet, always in the background and if anything needed changing or noting, or if anyone had got any comments, he latched on to it and paid attention to him.

We went out to Reims for the Twelve Hour after Le Mans. There were one or two amusing incidents there. You had to have a medical before each of these races and we went to a place in the middle of Reims for the medical. It was a nice hot day and we were waiting, about eight or ten drivers in a very small room, when all of a sudden Jack Fairman said; "It is very hot in here.' So Mike Keen said: 'Are you feeling faint. Jack?' and the next thing we knew, we had hlm laid out on the couch and and all the windows open and were undoing his collar, and the doctor was quite worried about him. We used to take the mickey out of Jack quite a lot. Mike Keen, Jim Mayers and Trevor Line had not seen the course before and wanted to go out and have a look, and they borrowed Jack's 400. They got in, just driving off and it was Jack Keen driving who beckoned Jack and said: 'What is this down here?' So Jack put his head inside the window to have a look, where-upon Mike slowly put in the clutch, and there was Jack running like Hell before he could get his head out."

Rheims 1954. Photo courtesy of Motor Sport

At Reims we had a little bit of trouble with wet getting onto the plugs on one of the cars, which was very surprising because Le Mans was even wetter than it was at Reims. It was a bit ironic because in 1953 I'd. suggested that we had. a flap on the air intake that you could shut from the cockpit so that you could draw under-bonnet air because, in I think it was 1951, with the Frazer Nash, during the night I had a couple of cylinders go out, and I came into the pits, went to take the plugs out, took the air cleaner off, and there in the two middle chokes, you could see it completely clocked by ice - carburetor icing. The temperature was probably around forty and the humidity fairly high. So, I was talking to Bristols about it and in 1953 we had this flap which would have been very useful in the wet to stop the wet getting in, because that is where it came in. They dropped it in 1954 and sure enough, one, if not two of the cars did have trouble with wet on the ignition. But it all went very well there, again with the philosophy, set a speed and keep going. Something went wrong with the lap scoring because we were pretty certain we were ahead of the Ferrari being driven by a man called Pozzi but, lo and behold, with about an hour to go it was found that they were a lap ahead of us and in the end, the Ferrari finished first and the three Bristols second, third and fourth. I do not know how that error occurred because going right through it, it was unbelievable, because we were pretty meticulous with the lap scoring, but I think if we had realised a bit earlier on we could have done something about it. The difference in average speed was only 0.4 of a mile an hour which meant that after twelve hours they were really not very much ahead of us, but it was too late when it was discovered..

There was a bit of a cross-wind down the straight at Reims that year. There's the straight and you go plunging down the hill, quite steep, and trees on one side, hedge on the other side, and. just as you get to the bottom the trees and hedge disappear and there are cornfields on either side. It was very interesting, as you came down - a cross-wind from the right. You could just feel the car do that; it just moved sideways whereas if you were following anybody else, he invariably did a wriggle. And the Bristol? Definitely it moved, but it did not sort of yaw into the wind or out of the wind as most of the other cars did. It really was extremely good aerodynamically.

Then in 1955 they used open cars and changed the rear suspension, which was quite a good move, really. The rear suspension was two trailing arms each side, which were rather too short and on full bump I believe the fore and aft movement of the wheel was something getting or. for three eighths of an inch, and if you got a bump on one side it gave you quite a steer effect, and so they went to a very ingenious linkage which gave virtually vertical movement for the rear wheels and the cars were much better on a bumpy corner. Well, that didn't matter so much at Le Mans, because that was rather billiard table like, but at Reims, had we run there in 1955 which we did not, it would, I am sure, have made a big difference.

The open cars were a lot quicker because the frontal area was down and I think they were very much nicer to drive; You did not feel so hemmed in. The lap speeds that year were down to 4.44 and that is half a minute quicker - more than half a minute, nearer thirty-five seconds quicker than we were the first year, so it shows how they improved during the years. One of the cars in 1955 was timed at 151 allegedly, and the others were in the one hundred and forties. Again, the bigger cars were not all that much quicker; the Ferrari, l8l, and I think it was Jaguars, 172.

There was the terrible Mercedes accident after three hours that was rather a dampener on everything. I have got my own views as to contributive factors for that. There were some MGAs running and. there was one Austin Healey that Lance Macklin was driving, and from the back they looked very much the same, and I think that possibly contributed to it. The Healey was very appreciably faster than the MGAs, and Hawthorn was coming into the pits and overtook Macklin. I am pretty certain he knew he was coming in, saw what, he thought was an MGA, and 'thought; 'Right, I'll go past that easily before I pull into the pits.' Being the Healey, and going much quicker, he rather carved it up going into the pits and Macklin pulled out and was hit by Levegh, and Levegh went into the crowd and eighty people were killed. Levegh I think was rather worried because he had just been lapped by another Mercedes in three hours. To be lapped, by one of your own team is a bit demoralising, I should think. But I do think that the Healey and the MG looking very similar possibly was a contributory thing, though I've never seen that in print anywhere. Another thing about the Mercedes; the open ones had air-brakes, a dirty great sort of air-brake, about that size, behind the seats. When they put their brakes on, that came up, and it was very disconcerting if they overtook you before a corner. You would go into a comer and you would take the line for the corner, and all of a sudden your view could be blacked out by this thing going up. You got used to it but it was quite bewildering.

We set out again to be consistent, and we were; and in fact Jim and I averaged just over 100 for the first twelve hours. By that time, all the opposition were out or way behind, and we were slowed, and it then got very wet - very wet indeed, and we were slowed more. I had a tin of boiled sweets on the passenger seat; you know, the sort of sweets you get with powdered sugar on them. It was just about full to the brim by the end of the race, and awfully sticky, and so was the whole of the passenger seat. Jim and I were ahead at the time and with about two hours to go the car started sounding rather nasty. I came into the last pit-stop and driver change, and it was found that one of the exhaust pipes had fractured just where it comes out of the cylinder head manifold, and Selby sort of said, would I go on and do the last run as well. The car sounded, he thought thoroughly unhappy and I had obviously got confidence in it, and he did not want Jim to get in and drive it too enthusiastically. So I had two stints in one go, which seemed rather long. I think it was about five hours non- stop. We slowed right down at the end of the race. The last hour we were lapping at about five minutes forty seconds; something like that, instead of four minutes fortyfour or fortynine or something.

Looking through the records, it is amazing the consistency. When we get something like ten laps with not more than two or three seconds variation in that time. I do not know an easier way of getting 4.55 seconds than driving round Le Mans in a Bristol. I don't know any other way of judging it easier.

The arrangements out there for food and so on worked out very well. The first two years, Mabel, Vivian Selby's wife, and his secretary organised the food. One of the transporters was set up as a kitchen and when you came off driving, they said: 'Right, what would you like to eat?' and it was all done. The other transporter had mattresses laid out and sleeping bags, and if you wanted to get your head down between drives, you could. It all worked out very well. In 1955 they took the person who ran Le Hautes restaurant in Bristol. I think his name was Leoni. He was a Frenchman who came from that part of the world, and he said if they took him out, he would do the cooking and we fed very well.

After the race we went back to the hotel at Arnage and there is a picture outside, where we were greeted like heroes. (Not the photo we had on p.11 of Bulletin No 50, which is of closed cars and shows the dents put into his car by Jack Fairman in 1954. Ed.) But what it came to was two years running at Le Mans; first, second, third in the class; seventh, eighth, ninth overall, which I think is a very good record. Admittedly, in 1955 we were beaten by three Porches; three 1 1/2 litre Porches, but we were only, I think, half a lap behind one of them but Selby was very, very insistent that whatever we did, we were just to stick to team orders and not go out and try and overtake. The only thing that got me slightly worried; it was naughty probably; at the end we said: "If you can come in, in line-ahead, in numerical order, do so.' and each year, I was the highest number. Therefore I came third in the queue. I think it was in 1954 I realised that if I went and waited for the others, one of the others would, overtake me and I'd be second, so I took good care to make sure that on the last lap it was I who did the catching up, having done one more lap than they did. Naughty; I suppose one should have waited and done it the other way round.

I think that is about all I've got to say. One or two other things; it is worth remembering that the fuel in those days was 87 octane; very significantly worse than regular fuel now. The engines were giving round about 158 horse. I went down to Bristol - in 1955 I think it was. I went down to Filton and saw one of the engines on the bed and that evening, I was in the Steering Wheel Club in London, and Gregor Grant came up to me and said in typical fashion: 'Ah, Peter. I was down at Bristols yesterday. I saw your engine on the bed. Yours is the best one, it's giving 170.' Well, he knew I'd been down to Bristol that day. He'd got no idea what power they were giving so he gave an outrageous figure, hoping I'd. say: 'No, it wasn't 170, it was only 158.' But I knew Gregor well enough not to, but those are the sort of tactics journalists get up to, trying to find out the truth. Tommy Sopwith said to Gregor Grant on one occasion, in my presence: 'Tell me, Gregor, why are you such a bloody liar?' He said: 'Well, if you tell enough lies, people will tell you the truth.'

The fuel tanks held 29 gallons. There were two tanks, one each side behind the front wheel, with a big inter-connecting pipe so one could fill up one side and we had somebody watching the other side to see the level. There was this oil tank, which I talked about earlier. The wheels were virtually rims with lugs on, and the wheel centre was part of the hub. The panels were incredibly thin; you could dent them with your thumb very, very easily. Amazingly thin, but I do not think there was any cracking of them. They must have been extremely well made. The back axle unit was a straightforward Ford van unit. The gearbox was basically a Bristol unit bolted into the Ford one, and I think the brakes were probably just the same, apart from the lining material, as the 404/405. They were twelve inch by two and a half. I should think they are the same brakes but different drums.

As far as I was concerned, it was a fascinating experience and the team spirit was absolutely magnificent in 1954 and 1955. It could not have been a happier team; everybody worked well together; there was a lot of fun, a very good atmosphere and it was a great pity they did not continue, but after the Mercedes accident, George White said; 'No, that's enough.' We were entered for Reims but the race was cancelled and that was the end of Bristol's racing. I think it did a lot for their reputation, it was a lot of fun but it was one hell of a long time ago.