The AC Aceca
& Aceca-Bristol
The AC Aceca is the hand-built aluminium coupé AC Cars produced at Thames Ditton from 1954 to 1963. This is the definitive independent archive of the Aceca and the Aceca-Bristol: what the car is, how it was built, what the three variants are, what one is worth, and where the surviving cars are.
AC's elegant fixed-head coupé, hand-built in Surrey.
The Aceca was the closed-roof sibling of the AC Ace and a direct ancestor of the Shelby Cobra, a lightweight aluminium-bodied grand tourer, coach-built at Thames Ditton over a hand-formed ash frame. Just 328 examples left the factory across nine years of production, each one shaped, trimmed and finished by hand.
UBR 135, 1958 AC Aceca-Bristol
One of just 169 Bristol-engined Acecas, matching-numbers, with an unbroken six-decade history and a Bristol six rebuilt by Stanton Motorsport with Cosworth pistons to around 140 bhp.
Read the featureOne silhouette, three characters.
Aceca
The original Aceca, powered by AC's own long-serving 100 hp overhead-cam six. The purest expression of Thames Ditton engineering.
Aceca-Bristol
The connoisseur's choice. BMW-derived Bristol power transformed the Aceca into a genuine 120 mph continental grand tourer.
Aceca 2.6
The rarest of the line. A late-production experiment with Ken Rudd-tuned Ford power, foreshadowing the Cobra to come.
Quick answers about the Aceca.
More questions? Read the full FAQ. Have a correction, or a car to add? Get in touch, this archive is maintained by an owner and improved by owners.
This archive is tended regularly.
Interior guide: seat runners and floor mounting
The interior care guide gained a section on seat runners and floor mounting, drawn from an AC Owners' Club forum thread. It covers the wood fillets fitted to the door side of the runners only, the adjuster lever sitting on the left of both seats, and the lack of a current source for replacement runners now that the specialist who supplied reproductions has died.
The single-car articles now have an index
Three pages on this site follow one particular car, and two of them could not be reached from the menu at all. The Featured menu item pointed straight at one specific car, UBR 135, while /featured itself did not exist and returned a not found page. There is now an index of the documented cars at /featured, and the Featured menu lists all three. The footer had also been quietly dropping History from its list of pages, the result of an off by one in the way that list was built; History now appears there.
New article: AC Ace Bristol BE 232
A new page records AC Ace Bristol BE 232, 593 CPC: an ex-works development car with a lightweight aluminium body, raced by Geoff Wilson and Vic Hassall at Goodwood, Shelsley Walsh and Chateau Impney, laid up in a barn for forty years under Victor Yates, and restored by Kevin Kivlochan. The page is drawn from a single named magazine source, "Aced It" by Ivan Ostroff with photography by Laurens Parsons, Classic Cars, April 2017, and credits its author and photographer plainly. What the article records as thought rather than fact is kept as such, and its 2017 valuation is not reproduced.
Solex float levels corrected, and a new page on removing the Bristol camshaft
The Solex float levels page said that owners who had used both setting methods reported they arrive at the same place. In fact one specialist stated that the two methods agree and then asked publicly whether anyone who had used both could confirm it, and no confirmation came. The page now records that the two have not been compared in practice, and invites anyone who has used both to get in touch. The discussion is now cited directly. A new page on removing the Bristol camshaft has also been added. It records a single owner's account of the job, including the correction he later made to his own conclusion: that the oil pan can be dropped with the gearbox in place and the timing cover taken off with the engine still in the car.
Do you own an Aceca?
The chassis registry is an ongoing project to trace every one of the 328 Acecas built. If your car, or one you know of, is not yet listed, we would be glad to hear from you.