BENTLEY MEMORIES

RICHARD BREMNER

You could see the distant drifts of smoke, hear the tyres squealing like scrapping cats. But the extermination of Pirellis made identification difficult, until some rare MIRA sunlight caught a flank. Reflecting it was the silhouette of a big, formal saloon pirouetting within its own length. A Bentley Mulsanne Turbo, savagely demonstrating how this halfforgotten marque was going to be restored to glory.

STEVE CROPLEY

A lovely guy called Ray Wiltshire once allowed me to drive his beautiful Bentley 3 Litre through rural France. I’d driven crash-gearbox, central-throttle cars before, but never in public. Managed a succession of quiet gearchanges on which Ray lavished much praise, but it was the car, not me. It’s why, one day, I still want my own ‘WO’.

ANDREW FRANKEL

Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Germany, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Austria, Italy, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Slovakia, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland. Last year I drove a Bentley Continental GT through 15 countries in 24 hours, during which it proved that the 100-year-old vision of its founder remains alive and well to this day.

DAMIEN SMITH

Forget Aston Martin, James Bond was a Bentley man – or at least he was in the original Ian Fleming books, as I discovered when I started reading them avidly as an 11-year-old. Bond continuation writers kept the Bentley link going, John Gardner featuring his 007 driving to Monte Carlo in a Mulsanne Turbo. It suited him perfectly – (whisper it) more than a DB5.

MATT PRIOR

Every time I see a Bentley steering wheel, I’m tickled. They’re hand-sewn and, to mark the spacing between stitches, each needleworker pricks the leather with a spacing tool: it’s a kitchen fork. The distance between prongs denotes the gap, and each worker brings their own, so each wheel rim, inside a picometre-perfect cabin, has a stitch pattern uniquely defined by cutlery.