The three most valuable Bentleys in the world offer a lesson in innovation for today.
Only four “Blower Bentleys” now exist in the world, and three of them gathered at the 2019 Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance, two brought by their private owners and one from Bentley’s own heritage collection. These are the most valuable Bentleys in the world; the last time one sold, back in 2012, it went for almost $8 million. And while they’re desirable for their undeniable speed, delicacy, beauty, and rarity, their development was anything but simple, or even sensible, and it offers an interesting lesson for today’s Bentley brand.
In the late 1920s, after a pair of triumphant victories at the prestigious 24 Hours of Le Mans endurance race, Bentley realized that its competitors were gaining traction—literally and figuratively—and it had to innovate. Being an engine-building genius, company founder W.O. Bentley wanted to increase displacement. This had worked for him before. The winning Bentley Le Mans car in 1927 had featured a robust 3.0-liter engine, and a move up to 4.5 liters had resulted in a second win in 1928. For 1929, W.O.’s plan for Le Mans was to upsize again, this time to 6.5 liters.
Unfortunately, W.O. had a boss, as many of us do. And the boss, Bentley chairman Woolf Barnato, was interested in making a profit. This meant, in part, keeping his deep-pocketed patrons happy. One of these wealthy benefactors was Dorothy Wyndham Paget, an owner of winning racehorses, a vampire (well, a nocturnal eccentric,) and an heiress whose dad was a British lord and mother was an American Whitney. Paget raced cars as well, and, as a means of furthering her driving career, she received instruction from Sir Henry Birkin, one of the famed Bentley Boys—a crew of wealthy and dashing Englishmen who raced and won in winged-B vehicles. And Birkin had other ideas for how to improve the performance of his beloved cars. He wanted a supercharger.
“W.O. was all about bigger engines for enhancing power and speed,” says Robin Peel, who is in charge of Bentley’s heritage cars. “And while supercharging was a great technology of the day, he thought it had flaws. It was in its infancy, regarding getting the boost pressure right, and drawing off the engine—kind of like early turbos. He felt that the bigger engines would be more reliable for an endurance race.”
With Paget as his backer, Birkin convinced Barnato to overrule W.O. and produce not just a suite of five supercharged variants of the Bentley 4.5-liter model (actual displacement: 4398 cc) for Le Mans, but also a run of 50 production cars necessary for homologation. These are the so-called Blower Bentleys, wonderfully potent and beautiful machines, with output boosted by more than 60 percent over their un-breathed-upon brethren, from 110 to 175 horsepower.
As a compromise, W.O. got his way as well, and the larger-motored car—known as the Speed Six—was built and raced, too. The supercharged cars, while fast as hell, proved too delicate for endurance racing. (According to Nobby Clarke, the manager of Bentley’s racing team back then, the reason was obvious: “The Blower eats plugs like a donkey eats hay.”) The Speed Sixes won Le Mans in 1929 and 1930; after that, a Bentley didn’t win there again until 2003.
Interestingly, this extended interval between racing successes coincides almost precisely with Bentley’s rather long era of Hard Times. The worldwide Great Depression of 1929 severely crippled the brand, leading to its purchase by Rolls-Royce in 1931—the same year Bentley was building the 8 Liter car that won this year’s Pebble Beach concours. This transaction led to a lengthy series of often interesting, but not necessarily distinctive, Bentley-badged vehicles, a run that only really ended with its purchase by the Volkswagen Group in 1998 and the release, in 2003, of the first truly modern Bentley, the Continental GT.
“History relates that Rolls-Royce bought the company and W.O. did not stay on,” says Peel. “Being owned by a bigger brand did lead to a period of time in which Bentleys were badge engineered, essentially versions of existing Rolls-Royces with a different badge.”
There seems to be a lesson here for the brand in its current circumstance. After enduring a series of recent mishaps—including production-cost overruns on the replacement for its best-selling Continental GT, engine certification mishaps on its entire lineup, and a resultant plummet in global sales—Bentley was forced to scale back many of its incipient projects. These include the green-lighting of an advanced two-place sports car, the delivery of its first battery-powered electric vehicle, and the release of its first plug-in hybrid. Though new cars should be on sale here soon, these delays in major innovation seem worrisome.
Bentley has attempted to remedy this, in part, with its recent Centenary concept, the 100 EXP GT, a mammoth, tech-forward, self-driving, electric-powered grand tourer. Of course, this vehicle is an evanescent dream and a fantastical projection of where the brand might be 15 years into the future.
“Bentley is moving toward hybrid and electrification, but it is by steps,” says Peel, noting that the Bentayga hybrid, the brand’s first, will finally be on sale in the States by the end of this year. “Customers look to us because they know the desire for innovation is there. But we want to combine the traditional with the technological to find ways to enhance driving pleasure. We don’t want grand, edgy stuff on the car that won’t make a difference when customers are driving or being driven.”
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