Four Small Wheels 08/2001

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Reflections on Bentley at Le Mans
by David Blumlein

'EXP Speed 8' they chose to call it. Ah, it is that epithet 'Speed' which forges the links with Bentley's illustrious past, an era in which this relatively young marque became the supreme force in sports car racing. There can be few genuine enthusiasts who did not feel some tinge of delight that the famous name's reappearance at Le Mans this year, especially in view of the fact that it did so unexpectedly well. After all, was it not a 'speed' model that was responsible for the firm's last two victories in the Sarthe?

This happy episode naturally awakes an urge to look back and reflect on some of the manifold achievements or, more specifically, on one particular car, the first racing Speed Six, subsequently known as 'Old no. 1", its race number on the occasion of its first Le Mans win.

This six-cylinder version of the vintage Bentley has an unusual provenance: it was created through necessity. The original 4-cylinder 3-litre model had been launched as a sporting car but it was very much the custom of the time, particularly among the more affluent in the twenties, to purchase a chassis and have bespoke coachbuilt bodywork added to one's taste. The 3-litre model fell victim to this trend rather more than intended and it soon became clear to "W.O." that the weight of all this bodywork was hampering the performance of the car. Something more powerful was urgently needed.

Thus came into being a 3-litre engine with two more cylinders giving a capacity of some 4 3/4-litres. A major difference was that the camshaft was now driven by a three-throw crank at the back of the block, reflecting something of W.O.'s early experience with railways at Doncaster.

This new motor was fitted to a prototype chassis clothed in rather clumsy six-light saloon bodywork with a deliberately ugly radiator shell, the car being passed off as a 'Sun' (although at this time there had been some four different cars built from Berlin to America bearing this name, the last such conveniently going out of business in 1924, the year we are concerned with!). Bentley himself and colleagues used the car on long continental test drives, the patron taking the opportunity to include visits to the French Grand Prix at Lyon and the Le Mans 24-Hours for which he had become an ardent supporter and which that year, of course, yielded the first of Bentley's five wins.

It was on the return to Dieppe that the 'Sun' by chance came across the prototype Rolls-Royce Phantom 1 equally on test and, as a result of the 'race' the two cars had for a while, Bentley became convinced of the need to increase the capacity of the 6-cylinder engine before production got underway. Hence the 6.5-litre, designed to cope with all that bodywork that the expanding Bentley clientele demanded.

The firm's racing activities continued to revolve around the 3-litre and its bigger cousin the 4.5-litre, the former bringing dramatic victory at Le Mans in 1927, the latter in 1928.

In the meantime the 6.5 was offered as a Speed Six, a twin-carburettor version upgraded to give more performance. One of these (to become the "Old No. 1") was given its race debut in the Double Twelve race at Brooklands on 10-11 May 1929. This event served as a useful curtain-raiser for Le Mans cars rather as the Silverstone 6-Hours/1,000 km came to be in the latter decades of the 20th century.

The Speed Six sheared its dynamo drive but this was amazingly to be its only retirement in its 'works' competition life through mechanical failure!
The car then led the 1,2,3,4, triumph of the marque at Le Mans that year, Barnato and Birkin leading the 4.5-litres home. Later that month this same car won the B.A.R.C. Brooklands Six-Hours race with Barnato and Jack Dunfee, only to be crashed at Bradshaw's Brae by the fearless Glen Kidson in August's T.T. on the Ards circuit.
Two more Speed Six cars joined the works team for 1930, the competition from Stutz and Mercedes calling for the bigger power of the six-cylinder engine, but "Old No. 1" did its stuff again at Le Mans, giving Barnato his hat-trick, sharing this time with Kidston. The Clement-Watney car came second but Clive Dunfee crashed the third, not being able to extract it from the sand at the modified Pontlieue corner.
The impending collapse of the company meant that this was the official team's last appearance at Le Mans but Speed Six "Old No. 1" had carved herself a special place in Le Mans history, shared only by three post-war victors: the honour of winning twice in succession with the same actual car (the others being the Ford GT40 P.1075 of 1968-69, the Joest Porsche 956 chassis 115 in 1984/85 and more recently the TWR Porsche WSC001 in 1996-97).

For the history books, the Speed Six is chassis LB2332, index no. MT3414.

And so to our new Speed Bentley. The story is still fresh in our minds and doesn't need repeating here but I finish with a couple of observations. First, the car is not a 'warmed-up' version of the Audi R8C coupés that failed at Le Mans because they had been commissioned far too late to be developed in time. Secondly, the Speed 8 is the first car to enter the LM-GTP category at Le Mans since 1999 when the aerial activities of Mercedes seemed to frighten everyone off from the class; it revives interestingly the debate about open or closed cars standing the best chance of coping with twenty-four hours of hard motoring.

And so, as the new decade unfolds, let us hope that the Speed 8 can at least live up to the record of the Speed Six model, the best of the vintage Bentleys and allegedly W.O's favourite.