(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) Before we get into it, I
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at all, Donut everyday. Hit that subscribe button and that bell so you don't miss anything. 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.
