Well I must have been really lucky as I have flown both - my last sortie in a Bucc was on Nov 14 last year at Thunder City but I had 2500 hrs on it prior to that! Sadly, but perhaps not when you read further, I only managed about 800 on the GR1.
In my view, and notwithstanding the digital wizardry of the GR1, the Bucc was a much better platform for almost everything that it was required to do in both overland and over water roles in the RAF. It was a much more comfortable ride at lowlevel over land or sea and it could fly some 15,000ft higher than a Tornado at high level; that's if you can call the paltry height that the Tornado cruises at to be high level. It was stable both as an AAR receiver and provider and whilst it couldn't match the Tornado for speed at low level when the latter was clean it could actually carry more ordinance further and at a higher sustainable speed for longer thanks to its rotating bomb door. As I stated on a previous thread, a Bucc could actually fly round the World without having to air-to-air refuel (we planned it but were stopped from doing it by RAFG because it would be an embarrassing act that its replacement the Tornado couldn't contemplate).
A Buccaneer 2 Star, as it was referred to by Roy Boot and his team at Brough, would have waxed most at low level in the role and provided a pretty good late 20th century mud mover in the RAF inventory.
By the way, it was never resparred after the 2 accidents when, first, a folding wing locking bolt fell out on a sortie in RAFG and then, second, when the wing broke off on Red Flag which saw a second 6-month grounding during my time on the Bucc; it just had the cracks that were repairable in its spectacle main spar smoothed out. Sadly, after that, however, its days were numbered.
Avionics aside, the Bucc gets it for me and anyway, most navs preferred the Mk 1 eyeball even when the Kalman Filtered Tornado allowed you to follow the green writing which most often resulted in the unwary getting lost!
And as the song goes:
Give Me Buccaneers They're British Through and Through
The Banana Jet the Best We've Had Yet
We Were the Last of the Few!
Yours proudly
Foldingwings