Track Royalty: Bentley's Racing Icons from Every Era
To celebrate 100 years of one of Britain’s greatest marques we gathered together three of its most famous racing cars from three very different eras of competition. In a world exclusive, Andrew Frankel channelled his inner Bentley Boy for a track test like no other.
This is quite something: the first time that cars from all three eras of Bentley’s racing history have been driven together. Each has their claim to fame: the GT3 is Bentley’s latest competition car, a state of the art racer in the most competitive category of sports car racing. The old Blower is not merely Sir Henry Birkin’s own car, not only the one in which he led Le Mans in 1930, but the one that exists today as the most original of all racing vintage Bentleys. And the one that sits in the middle chronologically? It’s the 2003 Le Mans winner – not one of a type of car that won that race but the actual winner.
They have come together at Silverstone to celebrate Bentley’s centenary. It’s not true that Bentley has always been a racing brand – for 71 of those 100 years Bentley did not race at all. But racing was there from the start – indeed Bentley raced long before it got around to delivering a car to a paying customer in September 1921. Over the decade that followed, Bentley put Britain on the racing map. True, Bugatti and Alfa Romeo dominated grand prix racing, but Bentley’s five wins at Le Mans between 1924-30 announced Britain’s presence on the global racing stage, a position from where the country has rarely looked back.
It was Rolls-Royce which denied Bentley the opportunity to race after it hoovered up the bankrupt company in 1931. Had it been Napier as originally intended, Bentley might not have had to wait a lifetime before returning to the track. But when it did under Volkswagen ownership in 2001, the results were swift, culminating in that 2003 Le Mans win, breaking the records for both the greatest distance covered in the 24 hours and the shortest time spent in the pits. Fast and reliable: WO would have been buzzing with pride.