Tim Birkin’s ‘Black Sheep’ Bentley

Posted in Cars, Engineering, Sport, Sporting Heroes, Uncategorized on Sunday, 25 September 2011

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This edited article about cars originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 823 published on 22 October 1977.

Bentley, picture, image, illustration

The Black Sheep Bentley by Graham Coton

In the world of ‘vintage’ and ‘veteran’ motor cars, the name of Bentley holds an honoured place, and proud owners of the comparatively few cars that remain in the world with that famous name care for them as if they were members of their families.

W. O. Bentley was an enthusiast who was fascinated by automobile engineering before World War I, but it was in 1919 that he designed a classic sports car which set a standard for high quality in engineering and the materials used. To make sure that his cars were always built to these high standards, Bentley gathered round him the very best craftsmen he could find, and virtually every car was hand-built.

Bentley’s dream was to make a sports car that was not only fast and safe, but the best in its class, and he succeeded. Because they were all built so carefully, they were inevitably expensive, and output was very low compared with the factories of today which churn out cars by the thousand evey week.

In fact, the firm of Bentley Cars built only just over 3,000 cars during its eighteen years existence. The company was absorbed by Rolls-Royce in 1931, and the name lives on in Rolls-Bentley cars. About 300 of the original Bentleys are still running today.

Bentley’s most famous cars were the fast three and four-and-a-half litre models which swept the board in sports car racing in the late 1920s. Bentleys won the Le Mans 24-hour race in 1924, 1927, 1928, 1929 and 1930. They reached the height of their fame in 1929, when they entered four cars at Le Mans which came 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th!

The British racing team was constantly being challenged by German Mercedes and Italian Bugattis, and in an effort to fight off some of these challenges, driver Tim Birkin persuaded Bentley to add a supercharger to the 4.5-litre model, as he was “hell bent to race them at Le Mans.” But they turned out to be the Black Sheep of the great family of racing sports cars.

About 50 of them were scheduled to be built, and although many people thought they would mark a high point in the performance of the 4.5-litre short chassis, they never actually won a race.

They did, however, have a few moments of glory, notably during the 1930 French Grand Prix when Tim Birkin raced the two-ton car into second place against a two-litre supercharged Bugatti. Many other cars had fallen by the wayside as the pace got too hot for them.

The ‘Blower Bentley’ (so called because the supercharger blew extra air into the carburettor) was also used to wear down the huge 7.5-litre supercharged Mercedes during the 1930 Le Mans, but had to be withdrawn later in the race with a broken valve. The giant ‘Merc’ was beaten, however, as the speed of the Bentley forced it to use its ‘cut in’ supercharger which resulted in it ‘blowing up’.

Finally, a track car developed by Tim Birkin from one of the early ‘blown’ cars raised the Brooklands lap record to 137.96 mph, and was successful in a number of special ‘challenge’ races at the old Weybridge race track. This car is still running!

In 1930, W. O. Bentley’s company was in financial trouble, and as a final fling he decided to try to attract new customers by producing an incredible 8-litre model. It had a massive 220 hp engine and was available in either a twelve or thirteen-foot-long chassis. It was a formidable car and was in direct competition with the Phantom Rolls-Royce.

Its huge 6-cylinder engine was so flexible that a driver had only to use first gear to get the car up to a speed of four or five miles an hour and he could then change into top gear and carry on up to 100 mph or more! From then on, according to a test report written at the time, all you had to do was just open or close the throttle or apply the brakes.

The lightest of the 8-litre Bentleys weighed three tons and could do ‘over the ton’ in almost total silence. As recently as 1959, one of these amazing cars was still breaking records with speeds above 141 mph.

Various firms specialising in coach-building were given the privilege of creating bodies for this last of the Bentleys’. One body built by the famous Thrupp and Maberly company, cost £3,000 in 1930. Such a car today would probably cost ten times as much!

Exactly 100 of the 8-litre model were built, and some of them still remain amongst the 300-odd vintage Bentley cars that survive today.

Few vintage cars have such a devoted following as the Bentley, not only in Britain, but in countries as far apart as the United States of America and France where racing enthusiasts talked about its successes right up to the outbeak of World War II.

W. O. Bentley himself died in 1973 at the age of eighty-five.

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