Description
By: Eric Dymock .
Walter Owen Bentley wasted no time in getting into car production after the First World War. His first appeared at the London Motor Show in 1919, an imposing 3 Litre sports, the prototype of a style evocative of the 192os and the Bright Young Things.
Bentley started racing in 1922, yet the foundations of the Bentley legend were laid the following year at the Le Mans 24 Hours race in France, which it won five years out of seven in the 193os. Bentley won the 1929 and 1930 Double-Twelve at Brooklands, the cars' combination of speed and strength creating a formidable reputation.
Bentleys were manufactured in Cricklewood north London from 1919-1931 but the company was chronically insecure. It was subsidised by wealthy drivers such as Woolf Barnato, who regarded the money poured into it as merely paying for his motor racing. In 1930 on the eve of liquidation WO produced his masterpiece, the grandiloquent 8 litre. Rivals such as Napier were so impressed they tried to buy the company, but in the event it was Rolls-Royce, by a stealthy stratagem for which they have been upbraided ever since, who picked up the pieces and created Bentley Motors (1931) Ltd.
WO Bentley was forbidden to work for anybody else, and in 1933 Rolls-Royce announced the Derby- built Silent Sports Car. Bentleys were based on Rolls- Royces yet managed to keep their racy reputation. Production moved to the former Merlin aero-engine shadow factory at Crewe after the war and there were memorable cars, such as the splendid Continentals of the 195os. In 1970 Rolls-Royce went bankrupt following the Lockheed aero engine debacle, and Rolls- Royce Motors was floated off as an independent company until 1980 when it was bought by Vickers. When it was again put up for sale in 1997 BMW ended up with Rolls-Royce and the VW group with Bentley.
Bentley was transformed. VW kept the louche glamour, returned Bentley to racing and won Le Mans. German engineering and British tradition produced a European car with a dazzling international reputation.
Bentley celebrated 60 years at Crewe in 2006, and in January 2009 90 years of Bentley Motors.
To be published for the 90th anniversary of Bentley Motors, this full colour large-format book has details, specifications and pictures of every Bentley, from the notable rotary aero engine of World War I to the latest collectors’ classic, the limited edition Brooklands.
A fully-illustrated chronology of the company and its racing since 1919 is included in this latest title from the award-winning series of Eric Dymock Motor Books.
The Complete Bentley is the definitive Bentley guide, and like the successful companion File books, the only single volume with an accurate comprehensive model-by-model guide.
