BENTLEY’S ROARING TWENTIES
Determined to make a name for himself at the top of Britain’s post-war car manufacturing movement, Walter Owen Bentley had one main ambition in 1919: “To build a good car, a fast car”. And into the melting pot to create the original 3 Litre went many valuable ingredients, including W.O.’s premium apprenticeship in locomotive engineering, his racetrack exploits on two and four wheels, and a thorough appreciation of the pre-1914 high-efficiency continental Grand Prix engine. Then there was his involvement in the French DFP (Doriot, Flandrin et Parent) 12/15 2 Litre car, both through the London sales agency he’d conducted with his brother ‘H.M.’ (Horace Milner Bentley) and at Brooklands, where W.O.’s pioneering high-compression aluminium pistons turned the DFP into a Brooklands record-breaker.
In fact, those pistons were to be his contribution to the First World War effort. Serving as a lieutenant in the Royal Naval Air Service’s technical department, he sold the idea to aero engine manufacturers such as Rolls-Royce and Sunbeam, and collaborated with Frank Burgess at Humber to adapt the French Clerget rotary aero engine, on which they redesigned everything except the valve gear.
Armed with such credentials, Bentley knew exactly what he wanted for his first car. Employing the best of prewar continental racing practice, it was to have a four-cylinder overhead-cam engine of three litres, with a crossflow head, four valves per cylinder, pentroof combustion chambers and the celebrated aluminium pistons. Advanced, certainly. But above all, it had to be a reliable unit for longdistance running, requiring minimum maintenance. Much of the credit for actually committing this design to paper was due to expert draughtsman Frank Burgess, whom Bentley lured away from what Frank called a “damned good job [at Humber] to join this outfit”.
SPEEDY ANIMAL
Although raising in January 1920. He waxed both Wagnerian and lyrical: “As the speed increased to 70mph the landscape leapt at us, wind shrieked past the screen… there comes the irresistible urge to burst into some wild war song… but still the silver radiator rushes towards that dark unattainable line of the horizon… done with the air of a lithe, active, speedy animal straining a little on the leash.”
