1953 Tojeiro Bristol

The Coys International Historic Festival meeting of July 1998 marked 50 years of motor racing at Silverstone and there was a display of cars marking each of those years.

This is the Tojeiro Bristol of Jeremy Agace which represented the year 1953. In the 1950s Cliff Davies, a London car dealer and enthusiastic club racing driver, asked John Tojeiro to provide him with a chassis into which he could fit a 2 litre Bristol engine. This chassis was given an aluminium body which was very similar in style to the 'Barchetta' bodies which had been popularised by Ferrari, and the car pictured above was the result. It's the car that John Tojeiro showed to the directors of AC Cars Ltd in Thames Ditton who were so impressed that they used the design as the basis for the AC Ace, which later evolved into the AC Cobra.