A Bit Of A Record!

When I received the handout relating to the preview at Brooklands of the new £91,000 Bentley, the Brooklands (see New Cars, page 966), four days before the press embargo was lifted, I read it with interest… until I came to the bits about what Bentleys had done at the old racetrack from which this new model takes its name. Then I was surprised to find that errors had crept in.

Writers will understand how this can happen, but one hardly expects it when an embargo gives time for copy to be revised, least of all from Rolls-Royce. For example, it seems rather unfair to the memory of John Cobb to say that Tim Birkin’s Bentley set the ultimate Brooklands lap record, and certainly no 4/2-litre Bentley with an Amherst Villiers supercharger started in the 1929 Double-Twelve race. Incidentally, although Bentley’s second place in that race is mentioned, it seems odd that such notable Bentley victories as winning the 1929 Six-Hour and 500 Mile races, the 1930 Double-Twelve and the 1932 ‘500’ are omitted.

Labelling one of the famous Le Mans ‘Bentley Boys’ as Dumfee is possibly just a printing error, but it was Forrest Lycett with his great eight-litre Bentley, and not George Eyston, who posted the marque’s final records at Brooklands before the war consigned the track to the history books. Eyston’s one-hour run in a Bentley Corniche took place over a month earlier.

Finally, the last BARC 130 mph badge has been wrongly ascribed, depriving George Harvey-Noble of this piece of Brooklands history. I drop the odd one myself, but the head of public affairs at Rolls-Royce seems to have set a bit of a record! W B