At the top of the luxury-car ladder sits Bentley Motors of Crewe, England. It’s a company that promises customers vehicles of the utmost luxury and dynamic capability, rooted in a tradition of motorsport dating back almost a century.
The only problem has been that Bentley’s motorsport heritage, on which it bases a great deal of its allure, has some rather large gaps in it. Gaps of 70-odd years. How long can a carmaker really claim that its products are the result of on-track success when most of its reputation comes from the 1920s? That question has been bothering the top brass at Bentley, and its parent company Volkswagen, for some time.
Last year, Bentley returned to motorsport after a decade-long absence, and says that by doing so, it’s directly improving its road cars. It’s about time – before 2001, it hadn’t competed on-track since well before the Second World War.
Bentley was founded by Walter Owen Bentley, better known as W O. He was a keen motorcycle racer, and when he found himself running a London car dealership with his brother in the early part of the 20th century, he spotted an opportunity – what better way to sell the cars than by proving their capability in competition?
Despite his lack of four-wheel experience, W O proved a natural, and began stacking up wins until the First World War intervened. During the conflict, W O’s engineering skills propelled him into the aviation industry, and he was given a factory to develop his own new engines. As the war drew to a close, he decided to plunge the knowledge that he’d learnt into developing cars.
In 1919, just 70 days after the signing of the Armistice, W O founded Bentley Motors and began designing. The company was aimed at a discerning clientele, and W O decided that racing success was the best way to prove what his new cars could do. Before a car had ever been sold, he despatched a prototype to several races on the famous banked track at Brooklands. On May 7, 1921, the Bentley EXP2 won the Whitsun Junior Sprint event, which meant that W O could label his car a race-winner before the London showroom welcomed a single customer.
In 1923, a single Bentley was entered at the already-famous 24 Hours of Le Mans – a full day and night of flat-out racing featuring the greatest cars of the day. The car only had brakes on the rear axle – and they failed during the race. The following year, Bentley was back with brakes on each wheel, and it won. From 1927 to 1930, Bentley won at Le Mans again, every year.
This racing success equalled publicity, but there was more to Bentley motorsport than just PR. The constant competition and gruelling mechanical challenges stoked the evolution of Bentley’s know-how, and unveiled potential problems that could be swiftly addressed. The racing programme was a fundamental part of Bentley’s operation.
But for all his cleverness, W O was not a great businessman when it came to money. His push for perfection in all areas of car production was not commercially viable in the long run. By the early 1930s, Bentley was in dire straits, profligacy within the company having been compounded by the 1929 Wall Street Crash. In July 1931, the receivers were called in, and the business was sold to its arch rival – Rolls-Royce.
Although Rolls continued to produce cars under the Bentley name, the racing programme was dead. Rolls was about luxury, not sporting performance, and although a few Bentleys appeared in races from time to time, they were always in the hands of private individuals.
After the Second World War, the vast majority of Bentleys were essentially rebadged Rollers, with no sporting pedigree and a focus on luxury and comfort. W O Bentley died in 1971, at which point the marque that bore his name was a mere shadow of its former self.
In 1998, Rolls-Royce’s parent company Vickers decided that it no longer wanted the firm in its portfolio, and sold it off. Rolls-Royce went to BMW. The Bentley name, however, was bought by the Volkswagen group.
After a series of popular turbocharged models had stirred up memories of past glories, there were murmurs within Bentley that a new, smaller, sportier coupé model could be introduced to revive the brand’s former image, but the sale of Rolls had put those thoughts firmly on the back-burner. Volkswagen relit the fire, and in 1999 it unveiled the Bentley Hunaudières concept supercar. It was never intended for production, but to make a statement to the world. It also kick-started development on a brand-new production car – the two-door, decidedly sporty Continental GT.
At Bentley's Crewe headquarters, for the first time in decades, minds went back to motorsport. As Andrew Frankel points out in his excellent book Bentley – The Story, what better way to announce that henceforth, Bentleys will have proper sporting pedigree?
In the autumn of 2000, the Volkswagen board was convinced, and a new programme was started that would build a Bentley to go back to Le Mans – and win. The EXP Speed 8 prototype race car was born, designed to be fast, but also beautiful. At Le Mans in 2001, Bentley was back racing for the first time in more than 70 years. The lead car finished third, and the drivers climbed the podium dressed as their Bentley Boys forebears from the 1920s.
The following year, Bentley consolidated its excellent start, entering just one car at Le Mans to complement the reveal of the Continental GT that same year. But it was Le Mans 2003 that was the main target, and when it arrived, Bentley was dominant. The two Speed 8s topped qualifying, and in the race, they finished first and second overall. Bentley was back on top of the podium at last, where it belonged.
And then the racing programme was stopped again. Brian Gush was in charge of the Le Mans project and says that the decision after 2003 was to grow the core business, selling cars.
“We could have gone back [to Le Mans] in 2004 and achieved, at best, the same result. But after our win, we’re back in the public eye, we’re talking to a younger demographic interested in motorsport and we decided to concentrate on selling Continental GTs.”
Bentley’s new sportier car proved a big success in the following years, but the long-term plan was always to get back to racing.
“When we pulled out of Le Mans, we went on record to say that it will not be another 70 years until we’re back,” says Gush. “We got up to our target [for selling Continental GTs], but then had the financial crisis, which put paid to any plans to go racing. Our new chief executive, Wolfgang Durheimer, said: ‘As soon as we’re back in the black, we’re going racing.’”
Since the arrival of the Continental GT, Bentley had been quietly working at making it ever-more performance orientated, culminating in the ferocious Supersports model in 2009. It was planned to go alongside a race programme; not with a prototype, as in 2003, but with a car instantly recognisable as a Bentley – with a racing Continental GT.
In late 2013, the Continental GT3 was unveiled, under Gush’s guidance. Working together with a technical partner, M-Sport, Bentley stripped an entire tonne of luxury from the GT to get the weight down to racing spec. The car competed in GT3 racing around the world in 2014, to considerable success.
According to Gush and Paul Jones, Bentley’s Continental product line director, motorsport has been instrumental in the Continental’s continued development as a sports road car, and also provided valuable lessons for the rest of the Bentley range, just as it did in the 1920s. Members of the road-car team work hand-in-hand with the race-car team – a design group at Crewe and at M-Sport in the north of England – and take back the lessons.
The most obvious result is the immensely powerful Continental GT3-R road car, released last summer. Inspired directly by the race car, it’s the most extreme road-going Bentley ever, with 600bhp, rear-wheel drive and a weight 100kg down on the regular Continental GT.
But there’s more influence on the company from the renewed racing focus than just the GT3-R. The two departments work alongside each other, from daily meetings of steering committees to physical testing of the road cars by Bentley race drivers. When the race car goes testing at a track, the prototype road cars go, too.
“There’s been some very close collaboration between the motorsport team and the road car teams on weight reduction, lightweight technologies,” says Jones. “Weight is the engineers’ enemy in terms of vehicles, so we’ve been looking very closely at what we could learn from the race programme.”
For Gush, the key result from the programme so far is the racing mindset that has transferred to the road-car team. “It’s the rigour of going through every single component and saying: ‘Can I make this lighter? Can it do two jobs?’” he says. “These guys that we pulled into the race-car project have to work at problem recognition, resolution, implementation at a rate that keeps pace with the project, which is very rapid. The benefit to the road-car function when they come back in is that agility, quick problem solving and quick resolution.”
This time, Bentley’s presence in motorsport is here to stay. For 2015, the team has built more cars to sell to customer racing teams, competing in more GT3 events around the world. Gush admits that he would love to return to Le Mans to compete for a class victory with the Continental GT, but the regulations for the famous race are currently too restrictive to make it economically viable. Hopes are high at Bentley that the rules will soon change, letting the British firm go back to its spiritual racing home.
“If GT3 cars were allowed back at Le Mans,” Gush says, “we’d be there.”
[ motoring@thenational.ae ]
