A Bentley Handbook, Concise but Deep

The popular German series on the history of the most prestigious brands in the automotive world has now created a Bentley edition. It’s concise but rich in content.

text:Hiromi TAKEDA
Translation: Mako Ayabe and Michael Balderi

At the risk of sounding prejudiced and a little too personal, I'm convinced that automobile enthusiasts in Germany have a special affection for the Bentley brand.
And this is not only because Bentley's currently owned by the VW Group. Vintage Bentleys from the W.O. era can be seen in great numbers at historic car races such as the Le Mans Classic, for example, and at road events such as the Mille Miglia and Gran Premio Nuvolari. In fact, while the majority of entrants are from Bentley's home country of Great Britain, Germany remains the second largest national presence.
I had the opportunity to ask a German participant at the 2000 Gran Premio Nuvolari about the reasons for this, his driving a 4 1/2 Litre 'Blower', and he told me that he dared to drive a Bentley rather than his country's Mercedes S-Vagen from the same period out of a rebellious spirit and sense of adventure. 'It's a great feeling to beat a Mercedes S-Vagen with this Blower Bentley,' he said.
When Germans produce a history book on Bentley, is it due to some embedded national characteristic that the result is so handsomely crafted? The book introduced in this article covers about a hundred years from the 1910s, when W.O. Bentley started as a dealer for the French-made small automobile DFP, to the present day. In that sense, it's not so different from the Bentley history book 'The Complete Bentley', published in the UK, which I introduced in the previous article. But this book feels more like a history book published by the manufacturer, with simple, beautiful photographs and illustrations that explain the history of Bentley in a way that is easy to understand.
The book is also accompanied by rare photos from a documentary point of view, such as the Bentley version of the R-R Camargue, of which only one was built in 1985, and shots of the special 'Cresta' that Pininfarina built at the end of the 1940s, based on the Bentley Mark VI. All of this makes for a very interesting read.


Bentley: Personenwagen seit 1921
Author: Matthias Braun／Alexander F.Storz
Publisher: Motor Buch Verlag
Pages: 128
Language: German

This is a revised version of an article that appeared in Flying B No 003 (2010). The information provided here was accurate at the time of publication.