In 1959 a customer’s AC Ace-Bristol was borrowed for Le Mans, won its class, and went back to being a road car. BEX1115 was completed at the same works four months later.
In 1959 the best two-litre GT car at Le Mans belonged to a lady from Kent who, two years earlier, had been in charge of the team’s catering. Promotion in motor racing has always been unpredictable.
The lady was Jane Waugh, an enthusiastic amateur who ran her Ace in sprints, hill climbs and rallies, and the car was an AC Ace-Bristol in very nearly standard road trim. That a privately owned road car could be lent for the world’s most demanding race, win its class and return to normal duties says almost everything worth knowing about the model. The rest is in how it got there.
It began with John Tojeiro, a self-taught engineer whose recipe was simplicity itself: a ladder frame of two large tubes, with a transverse leaf spring and wishbones at each corner. It gave the Ace independent suspension all round, usually claimed as a first for a post-war British sports car, at a time when several rivals were still coaxing a live rear axle into good behaviour. Over the frame AC laid a hand-formed aluminium body, and the finished car weighed about 850 kilograms, rather less than a modern supermini. Light weight is the cheapest performance there is, and the kindest: it spares the brakes, the tyres and, over a long day, the driver.
The engine took longer to sort out. AC launched the Ace in 1953 with its own straight six, a design that first ran in 1919 and which, for all its dignity, had little left to give. Ken Rudd, a Worthing garage owner with a racing habit, put a Bristol engine in his own Ace, took it to Goodwood in April 1956 and went on to win that year’s Production Sports Car Championship. AC, which had been watching with interest, adopted the combination the same year. In the trade this is known as market research.
The Bristol unit was a German émigré. Its design was BMW’s, from the pre-war 328, and it came to England in 1945, when H.J. Aldington, while still in the Army, flew plans and development engines home from the bombed BMW works. They were later declared war reparations, and BMW’s chief engineer, Fritz Fiedler, followed them. To obtain hemispherical combustion chambers from a single camshaft, the engine works its exhaust valves through cross-pushrods over the top of the head. It is an unusual solution. It is also a very good one. In road tune it gave around 125 bhp, enough for 0–60 mph in about nine seconds and a top speed near 120 mph; The Motor recorded 0–50 mph in 7.9 seconds, which in 1957 was considered sensational. It came with Bristol’s own four-speed gearbox, a considerable improvement on the Moss box of the earlier cars.
The figures tell only half of it. The steering is light and high-geared, there is just enough roll to tell you what the car is doing, and the balance is such that it settles into a long, quick corner and stays there. The gearchange is short and crisp. The cockpit offers a slender wood-rimmed wheel and a dashboard with an instrument for nearly everything, in the British tradition of wishing to be kept informed. Then there is the engine note, a hard, even six-cylinder bark that sharpens as the revs rise and has given more than one owner an excuse to take the long way home.
America took to it at once. Ace-Bristols won the SCCA’s E-Production championship in 1957, 1958 and 1959. The authorities moved them up a class, and they won again; moved them up once more, and they won again. One imagines the rule-makers eventually ran short of classes, or of patience. Carroll Shelby, the outright winner at Le Mans in 1959, was paying attention too, with consequences that need no retelling here, except to say that the Ace came first.
