Bentley Celebrates 90th Birthday of ‘The Silent Sports Car’
Bentley Celebrates 90th Birthday of ‘The Silent Sports Car’
60 Bentleys from the ‘Derby era’ congregated at Bentley’s Dream Factory to celebrate 90 years of one of its fabled classic models. The festivities were positioned as part of a wider celebration involving 117 Derby-era Bentleys, with the world's one-of-one 1939 MkV Corniche returning for the first time in 84 years to join the supreme cavalcade on public roads.
Bentley Motors welcomed 60 timeless Bentleys from the ‘Derby era’ to Crewe to celebrate the 90th birthday of the Bentley 3½ Litre, known simply as the ‘Derby Bentley’.
Organised by The Silent Sports Car Club – the owners’ club dedicated to the Derby Bentley – a cavalcade of prime automobiles convoyed to Bentley’s Dream Factory in Crewe last Friday, with more than 100 guests enjoying a tour of the campus, an exploration of Bentley’s newly refurbished Heritage Collection and a visit to the Mulliner workshops.
In addition, one of the crown jewels in Bentley’s fleet – the one-of-one 1939 MkV Corniche, recently re-registered and returned to the road for the first time in 84 years – was welcomed as the guest of honour at a black tie dinner to formally mark 90 years of the Derby Bentley.
The Derby era saw Bentley producing up to 500 cars per year, the first lines of manufacture under Rolls Royce ownership. This period of Bentley history also produced some important one-offs – the recently-restored 1939 MkV Corniche, as well as the streamlined ‘Embiricos’ coupe of 1938. Together, these two cars helped shape the design DNA that would sculpt the Bentleys of the 1950s and even inspire today’s original Continental GTs.
