(engine revving)
- From huge engines and loads of power
to exotic wood and quilted leather,
few companies blend eye watering performance
and butt coddling luxury, as well as this one does.
(engine revving)
This is everything you need to know
to get up to speed on Bentley.
(lightning crashes)
(whimsical music)
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Now, with that out of the way let's get in.
If you've made enough money to buy a Bentley
or to call your second studio album
"Beer Bongs and Bentley's" nice,
everyone knows that you have officially made it.
Few cars offer as much speed, power, and luxury
in one package but most of the good stuff
actually happened early on in the brand's history.
In the early 1900's, Walter Owen Bentley
and one of his brothers owned a company
that sold French DFP cars in Cricklewood, North England.
English people are the best at naming stuff.
Cricklewood.
This looks like a good piece of land, it does, it does.
What should we call it?
(twig snaps)
(gasps)
Cricklewood.
If you wanna know what a DFP car is, Google it.
I just ain't got time,
'cause this is up to speed on Bentley.
Now Walter had previously worked on locomotives
and motorcycles so he really wanted to build his own cars.
The engineer side of his brain thought,
"Why not make pistons out of lightweight aluminum
instead of heavy old iron?"
Genius.
He came up with his own aluminum alloy,
fab some new pistons,
and installed them in one of the French cars
he should have had up for sale.
It worked out really, really well.
He set speed records and won a ton of races
with it at local tracks.
Then there was a big war,
and everyone stopped doing stuff for fun for a while.
I'm sure you guys can all relate.
But, WO had made a big enough name for himself
that the British government asked him for help
with the war effort.
They used Bentley pistons in World War I bi-plane engines
and when the war was over, Walter was awarded an NBE.
That's a fancy British title.
It's like a knight or something
and he also got enough money to start a new business.
The Bentley Motor Company.
So Walter set out to make a fast car, a good car,
the best car.
Formal Royal Flying Corps officer named Clive Gallop
designed a three liter, four cylinder engine
for the first Bentley that was super advanced for the time,
it had four valves and two spark plugs per cylinder.
It had a dry simp oil system, that's race car stuff.
And an overhead cam shaft.
The first Bentley three liter was delivered in 1921
and they became known for being extremely reliant.
(engine revving)
They raced in local hill climbs, and at Brooklands,
the world's first purpose built banked race track.
By 1922, they were already running in the Indianapolis 500.
They started 19th and finished 13th.
Not too shabby for their first 500 mile race.
But Bentley thought that racing for 24 hours straight
was ridiculous but after seeing a customer
place fourth in a Bentley
in the 1923, 24 Hours Of Lemans,
they entered a factory team
for the next seven years straight.
(whimsical music)
Now as we've mentioned in previous episodes,
back in the day it was pretty common
to only supply the drive chain, the chasse, and the badge
without a car body.
Then the buyers would commission a custom body
from a local coach builder which meant
that cars from one manufacturer didn't all look the same.
Now Bentley could look like anything,
so the badge was the only way that you'd know what it is.
Now apparently, taking a badge from a more expensive
or cooler car and putting it on your not as cool car
was a thing that people did in the 1920's
just like they do today.
It's okay that it's not a real M3,
but there's no such thing as an M3 28IS.
Just like a Type R badge.
So with that in mind, the Bentley badge was designed
with a different number of feathers on each wing.
Bentley figured that people who made fake badges
wouldn't notice this, so the forgeries would have the same
number of feathers on each side and be easy to spot.
Yeah, it's a Bentley.
In 1925, Captain Woolf Barnato,
a wealthy diamond mine heir, bought his first Bentley
and started winning races in it.
When Bentley struggled to make ends meet,
Woolf invested his own cash into the company
and ended up taking control of the whole thing.
He and a handful of other independently wealthy racers
came to be known as The Bentley Boys.
They were Woolf Babe Barnato, Sir Henry Tim Birkin,
Glen Kidston, J.K Benjy Benjafield reporting for duty,
John Duff, and Sammy Davis baby.
How cool is that?
Four of them lived in apartments
right next door to each other in a fancy part of London
where they threw parties that lasted for days
and parked their Bentley's all together in one corner.
That's awesome!
That's the coolest thing I've ever heard in my life!
Just like me, and Nolan, and Jobe, and Jeremiah,
and Joey, and Joe and all the Donut guys
just parking all our cars next to each other
and just like, "Oh man, what day is it?"
"I don't even know, party day."
The general public imagined the friends
sipping Mo Weezy together at clubs,
betting on the ponies, playing the stock market
and honing their bets on weekends.
Which is exactly what they did.
It was the Great Gatsby lifestyle
everyone wished they had,
and the Bentley Boys were a major part
of building up the Bentley brand's prestigious reputation.
Benjy Benjafield and Sammy Davis
managed to score the company's most dramatic win
at the 1927 24 Hours Of Lemans.
The entire Bentley team and several other cars
were involved in one huge crash.
While the others were taken out,
Benjy and Sammy's old number seven Bentley
was still drivable and they nursed it to the end
in first place.
Bentley has then won for the next three years in a row
even sweeping the top four places in 1929.
Now compared to the racy Bugatti's at the time,
Bentley's were huge, they still are.
But their engines were also twice as big
and you know what they say about bigger engines, right?
They make over power baby.
Wait, why do you have a microphone?
Watch the news.
Walter Bentley didn't like the idea
of using force induction to make more power,
he's actually the guy who came up
with the muscle car fan boy's favorite phrase,
"There's no replacement for displacement."
People were putting heavier and heavier bodies
onto his chasse too, which is why Bentley built
a six and half liter in line six
and called it the Speed Six.
But Bentley Boy, Tom Birkin wasn't having it.
He was old school boost creeping,
he wanted a lighter weight, super charged four cylinder.
The super charged Bentley
was the company's equivalent of a drag car.
Fast as hell, but it was unreliable for endurance racing.
Ask Nolan what that's about,
you add boost to your car and you ruin it.
So turned out that back then
there still wasn't a replacement for displacement
because Walter's Speed Sixes won both the 1929 and 1930
Running's Of Lemans, but despite that
the blow Bentley was the most popular model at the time,
probably because there was a freaking root super charger
hanging off the nose like a whiny silver booger.
In all, Bentley's won Lemans five times
out of eight attempts between 1924 and 1930.
After the fifth win,
Walter claimed he'd learned everything they needed to know
about speed and reliability
and retired the team from racing.
I mean, you might as well go out on top, right?
Walter capped off 1930 with the Bentley eight liter.
A massive in line six cylinder
that was guaranteed to do 100 miles per hour
no matter what coach work was on it.
It made about 220 horse powers,
which was huge power at the time,
when other high performance cars barely made 100.
And they cruised smoothly and quietly.
His personal eight liter was restored in 2006
and every Bentley CEO gets the keys to it
as a reminder of the company's philosophy.
It was WO's masterpiece, but only 100 were made
because the Great Depression was in full stride
when it came out.
Nobody was buying anything expensive
because nobody had any freaking money.
Woolf was too scared to keep dumping his own cash
into the business, so the Bentley Motor Company
was put up for sale.
Pretending to be another company in disguise,
Rolls Royce bought Bentley
because they wanted to eliminate their biggest competitor.
One entire Bentley Motor Company please.
Wait a second, are you Rolls Royce?
What?
No, it's Royce Rolls.
All right, one Bentley for the tall gentleman up front.
Production was suspended for a few years.
It moved from Cricklewood to the Rolls factory in Derby.
All the cars made before the takeover
are called Cricklewood Bentley's.
I'm sure Jay Leno has a million of them.
Cars made from 1933 to 1939 are called Derby Bentley's
and they're basically badge engineered Rolls Royce's.
They were advertised as The Silent Sports Car
and were still really, really good though
'cause I mean, Rolls Royce, Rolls Royce doesn't suck.
Car production around the world pretty much stopped again
for World War II and picked back up in a newer factory
in Crewe, which is where Bentley's are still made today.
A while after the war ended,
long time Rolls Royce engineer, Ivan Evernden,
decided to distance new R type Bentley's
from their corporate silver dawn sickle.
He developed the high performance 1952 R type Continental
with a long, low body and tested it in an actual wind tunnel
so air could be optimized.
Ivan wanted it to be something that you could drive
comfortably across the entire continent of Europe
at over 100 miles per hour.
But there were no tires available
that could handle the weight
of such a big luxurious car at those speeds.
Regular models were made out of heavy steel
so fancy pants coach builders, H.J Mulliner
had to use aluminum, extensively to make it work.
The car didn't even come with a radio
because it would be too much added weight.
The R type Continental sold for almost
seven thousand British pounds,
which was over three times the average cost of a house.
So how do you make
the best grand touring car around even better?
You add two doors and call it
the S Series Continental Flying Spur?
Exactly, thank you.
No problem baby.
Now, passengers could envelop themselves
in backseat bouginess without awkwardly
climbing past the front seats like pleas.
What am I gonna do?
Touch my driver in front of everybody.
The S Series Continentals were the last Bentley's
to be sold as bare chasse and be bodied by someone else.
The T Series that debuted in 1965 and ran into 1980
was made fully in house.
It was just a Rolls Royce Silver Shadow
with a different grill and badge on it.
By the 70's, the re-badged Bentley's
were barely 5% of Rolls Royce's productions
so they tried to revive the brand
by playing up it's racy past
and building performance models again.
All right, nice that's good plan.
The new Mulsanne was named after
the famous Lemans straight away
and they gave it and the new Brooklands models
turbo charged 6.7 five liter V8's.
The second gen Brooklands made the most tour
of any gas powered production V8 with 770 pound feet.
(engine revving)
Bentley's sales shot back up to surpass Rolls
except it didn't really matter because the two brands
were both now owned
by an engineering company called Vickers.
(whimsical music)
In 1998, Vickers sold both luxury car brands
to Volkswagen because yeah, duh.
Volkswagen owns everybody, but here's the thing,
Rolls Royce also makes airplane engines
and due to some prior airplane engine's business with BMW,
BMW ended up with all of Rolls Royce's trademarks
and ultimately the entire brand.
Now Volkswagen managed to hold onto Bentley,
but they really wanted both
as if they didn't already own enough car brands.
In a bid to revive Bentley's brand performance heritage
again they went back to the 24 Hours Of Lemans
for the first time in 70 years.
(engine revving)
A Speed Eight prototype came in third in 2001
and two Speed Eights took first and second in 2003.
Right after the win, the sleek new Bentley Continental GT
came out and launched the brand's highest sales ever.
It was a grand touring coupe,
who's styling was obviously inspired by
earlier Continental designs.
It was still all hand built,
but since it was based on the VW Phaeton Sedan
it can now be mass produced.
With the six liter, twin turbo W12,
masses of people wanted them produced.
Sales shot up from just 800 total Bentley's per year
to nearly seven thousand Continental GT's per year alone.
(engine revving)
2007 was the first year that Bentley sold
more than 10 thousand cars.
Okay, so super niche brand doesn't make a lot of cars.
Volkswagen buys them, all of a sudden this one model
outsells pretty much the entire number of cars
they've ever sold ever.
Sound familiar?
Check out this episode of Up to Speed on Lamborghini.
I'll put the link in the description below.
A whole line of Continental GT variance
spun off from that success, including the new Flying Spur
and Mulsanne editions and sales are still going strong.
For buyers who didn't want a Mercedes ANG
or Italian Exotic, the new Bentley models were just right.
A touch of British class,
with a bunch of refined power baby!
Refined power baby!
Nowadays, SUV's are what everybody wants,
especially rich people.
So the huge Bentayga is now Bentley's most popular model.
They're among the top of the performance luxury game
with huge powerful engines and hand built craftsmanship.
There's a ridiculous number of ways
to customize a new Bentley.
From choosing your own two tone leather and wood trim
all the way down to the color of the carpet binding.
I had to look up what carpet binding was.
And for the ultimate Bentley freak,
there's the WO edition Mulsanne by Mulliner.
Bentley brought the legendary British coach builder
in house to make special editions.
When Walter WO Bentley's personal eight liter
was restored in 2006, the engine was rebuilt
and the original crank shaft was set aside.
And to commemorate 100 years of Bentley,
they sliced it up in 100 cross sections
and laid them into the back seat beverage trays
of 100 new Bentley Mullsanne's.
If you wanna know what it cost,
you won't find out on the website
because if you need to know the price before you buy it
you can't freaking afford it dude.
Now if you have two million dollars lying around
to dole out on one of 12 Bentley Bacalar Roadsters
then you're a lucky dude.
It has wood trim made from trees that weren't cut down.
They simply got tired of living and fell of their own accord
and then hung out in an English peat bog
for five thousand years.
I saw one at Geneva, it's sick.
Now that's what I call some good wood.
(crickets chirping)
Now Bentley sells and makes more cars today
than they ever have,
but if you can afford any of their models
you'll still have a very rare and very, very special car.
Thank you so much for watching this episode of Up To Speed.
We gotta give you guys some stuff to watch
if you're stuck at home.
Go ahead and hit that subscribe button
so you don't miss anything.
We got Wheel House on Monday,
on Tuesday, we got Bumper to Bumper,
Wednesday we have Money Pit,
Thursday, got this show it's called Up To Speed,
Friday, my brand new show called the D List,
Saturday we have a show called Versus,
and then of course Sunday we have our podcast Past Gas.
We're pushing, hang in there.
I love you.