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A Portuguese Racer Reborn: The 1956 AC Ace Bristol "BEX133
Built at AC's Thames Ditton works on 16 April 1956 and finished in Mist Green Metaline, this Ace Bristol was shipped straight to Lisbon as one of the first examples sold new in Portugal. Registered with the plate GG-23-75 — which it still wears seven decades later — the car wasted no time proving its mettle. Sporting Club de Portugal driver António Leitão de Oliveira campaigned it hard through the… 1956–57 Portuguese Drivers' Championship, racking up class wins in rallies against period rivals like the Mercedes-Benz 300SL, Porsche 356 and Triumph TR.
The car changed hands (and colors) through the early 1960s, eventually landing with young gun Luís Fernandes in 1960. Now repainted a striking white with black accents, BEX133 tackled everything from the Boavista Circuit support race at the 1960 Portuguese Grand Prix to an ambitious, if unsuccessful, entry in the 1961 Monte Carlo Rally. Its competition career wrapped with a strong 7th-place, class-winning drive at the 1961 Circuito de Alverca — a fitting send-off for a car that had spent five seasons punching above its weight against far more exotic machinery.
In late 1967, 19-year-old engineering student João Carlos de Magalhães do Amaral Neto bought the tired Ace — and never let it go. What followed is a remarkable 59-year single-family ownership, including a decade-long restoration completed in the 1970s that returned the car to its dark green livery, years of vintage rallying and hillclimbing across Portugal, and a memorable 2003 pilgrimage — driven, not trailered — to Bristol, UK for the AC Ace's 50th anniversary celebration.
Most recently, marque specialist Nuno Afoito led an exhaustive six-year, nut-and-bolt restoration back to the car's original Mist Green Metaline finish, hunting down a correct replacement cylinder head and painstakingly recreating the factory paint along the way. The result, in Afoito's words, is a car that "sounds and behaves like nothing else on the road." With two Portuguese champions among its period drivers, a documented 1956–1961 competition history, and just two owners since 1967, BEX133 isn't just a beautifully restored AC Ace — it's a rolling piece of Portuguese motorsport heritage.
Located in Portugal.
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