ROBERT COUCHER
The Driver
This is our special issue celebrating 100 years of Bentley, a great British marque that has survived against all the odds. It was founded 1919 by the legendary Walter Owen Bentley, who began as an apprentice for the Great Northern Railway, and his cars went on to win the gruelling Le Mans 24 Hours five times in period. After that great winning streak, ‘WO’ lost his company to his arch-rival Rolls-Royce in 1931. There he was ruthlessly shut out of any more design work and deprived of his 8 Litre company car.
Then, his wife having divorced him, ‘WO’ had to borrow Hillmans from his friend William Rootes. He left Rolls-Royce in 1935 for some more exciting engineering at Lagonda, masterminding the magnificent V12 engine in the Rapide. He ended up driving a Morris Minor, which he liked for its accurate steering and nimble handling. He was a great British engineer who should have had the chance to accomplish more.
Who can’t fail to be impressed by the thunderous vintage Bentleys with BRG livery and blaring open exhausts? And a supercharger? Why not? I have driven a few WO-era Bentleys; every experience has been truly exciting but also slightly fraught. We all know how that bloke who designed dainty French motor cars referred to Bentleys as fast lorries and, guess what, he was right. The gearbox is the bummer. No matter what Bentley Drivers Club or Benjafield Racing types say, the gearboxes are bloody awful. I have had to go back to driving school with a number of specialists to learn to drive vintage Alfa Romeos, Bugattis and even an old Chrysler 75, all with non-synchromesh gearboxes, but none offered up the challenge of a WO Bentley ’box.
But I took heart when, in 2005, I joined Bruce McCaw to retrace Woolf Barnato’s race against the Blue Train from Nice to London’s Berkeley Square. We were in the original Mulliner-bodied Bentley Speed Six saloon that Barnato actually drove, as well as the Gurney Nuttingbodied ‘Blue Train’ Speed Six, which was not ever there. No matter; Bruce McCaw owns them both, and we enjoyed blasting them back to London to have a stiff drink in Morton’s Club on the Square with Barnato’s indomitable granddaughter, Diana Barnato Walker. She was part of the Air Transport Auxiliary, delivering Spitfire fighters to RAF squadrons during World War Two.
I took heart because I spent many of those miles with the very well-known moustachioed Bentley ambassador who has the names Charles and Richard included within his nomenclature. He drove the two lorries beautifully but every now and then one of the gearboxes would throw an almighty strop. Unlike me, who would stop, apologise and gently try again, the Ambassador just snarled and whacked the recalcitrant gearlever into the required cog, maintaining an air of total indifference as the heavy gears gnashed and smashed.
Vintage Bentleys are great and rumbustious machines, even if the 3 Litre is a bit slow. The fastest 3 Litre I have come across is that of Duncan Wiltshire of Motor Racing Legends fame, a highly developed machine painted in innocent baby blue but indecently fast. I bet the engine is about five litres, although he assures me it is entirely original.
Then enthusiast Jonathan Turner lent me his 1925 3 Litre Le Mans works car to drive the RAC 1000 Mile Trial in 2014. William Medcalf took me out for a day’s training, somewhat crushing because he was clearly so good at cog-swapping and I was not. But I did eventually learn the foibles: change from first to second gear with a very slow double-declutch, keeping the revs low; second to third to be exacted quickly; and third to top easy. Coming down is much harder but it soon began to work. There’s nothing more satisfying than taming a WO gearbox, but the real trick is to get it into top, never change down and never lift off.
There were a few Bentleys in our garage as I grew up, but they were Derby Bentleys – sporting Rolls-Royces – so regarded with some disdain by WO types. A great Derby proponent was the Rt Hon Alan Clark. In his book Backfire, Clark pointed out that a 3½-litre Derby ‘will run away and hide from most WO models’ and quoted the 30 March 1934 issue of The Autocar, which compared the acceleration of the Derby with that of a 3 Litre Speed model: 0-60mph in 13sec compared with 23sec.
Two of our Bentleys were saloons, one with a Vanden Plas pillarless body, the other a Sports Saloon by Mulliner of Birmingham. That was a fabulous car, very enjoyable on road rallies, where it surprised a few sport cars with its speed and manoeuvrability. Its delightful gearbox had synchro on third and top, and its steering was light. Truly, post-WO and, as the ads promised, a ‘silent sports car’.
‘WO BENTLEY ENDED UP WITH A MORRIS MINOR, LIKING IT FOR ITS ACCURATE STEERING AND NIMBLE HANDLING’