We take a brief look back at Wrightbus’ previous model to use the Contour name
The 2025 Contour isn’t Wrightbus’ first venture into building something more luxurious than a standard bus, and as early as the 1960s was building bodies on the Commer Walk-Thru chassis for travelling Irish showbands. The minicoaches were the very early seeds of what would follow, a new coach for the 1980s which looked radically different to anything else on the market, with its covered rear wheels, low profile design and large black swathe enveloping the windscreen and cab windows to create a unique style.
Built on a Bedford chassis initially, the Contour was launched in 1983, and was the culmination of a two year period of heavy investment and research, design and development work. Reports say that the model was extremely well received by both the trade press and potential customers at the time of its launch, and other notable features beyond the farings were double-glazed windows on the top-specification model, and for the first time the use of bonded rather than gasket glazing, giving the coach a very modern and distinctive look, which Wrightbus said was designed to project an air of quality.
As part of efforts to increase its market share, the company decided to offer the coach on a Leyland Tiger chassis, the first of these, four 57-seat, 12 metre variants with gasket glazing, entering service with Ulsterbus in 1984/85.
In total, only 36 Contour coaches were manufactured, on a combination of Bedford, ACE Ford and Leyland chassis, apart from the final vehicle, purchased by Liddel’s of Auchinleck, which was built on a Volvo B10M, and to a higher overall height. This final vehicle gained the ‘Imperial’ suffix to distinguish it from the lower-height version.
The model was killed off by a combination of factors, including changing travel patterns, with fewer coach operators choosing to travel abroad, and a question mark over the suitability of the Bedford chassis, which had always been seen as a lightweight option, along with poor support for Bedford products across Europe. Although Wrightbus had intended to restart production when the coach market picked up, a fire at its then factory resulted in irreparable damage to the fibreglass moulds used for the model’s bodywork, leading to a somewhat forced decision to withdraw from that segment of the market altogether.
