Yet another link with the old Brooklands’ days has been severed by the death of Major Oliver Bertram. He was a regular competitor at the Track, in a variety of cars, but will be remembered best for his great drives at the wheel of the venerable 10 1\/2-litre V12 Delage and the 8-litre Bentley-based Barnato Hassan in its two stages of development. With the old Delage Bertram got his 130-m.p.h. badge in 1933 and in 1935 he raised the lap-record to 142.60 m.p.h. in the Barnato-Hassan, a speed bettered only by Cobb’s Napier-Railton, and which stands for all time as the Class B Brooklands’ lap-record, Bertram having first set this to 137.73 m.p.h. with the same car. His brave runs in the Delage at Inter-‘varsity speed trials will also be well remembered.<\/p>\n
A barrister by profession, Bertram joined the Army when war broke out and rose to the rank of Deputy Advocate-General. After the war he lived in the West Country but was at Brooklands for the 1967 Re-union and he had been a Vice-President of the Bentley DC from 1936 to 1956. His racing of big motor-cars on the outer-circuit showed great talent. In 1937 he shared the 24-litre Napier-Railton with its owner, John Cobb, when they won the BRDC 500-Mile Race at over 127 m.p.h. and in 1938 he lapped at 143.11 m.p.h. in a race in the Bamato Hassan, which could not count as a lap-record but was within 0.33 m.p.h. of Cobb’s outright record, in a car of 16-litres greater engine capacity. Bertram retired from racing in 1938, after twice winning the BRDC Gold Star for Track racing.<\/p>\n
Some time ago he visited the Motor Sport offices and said he intended to write a book about his motor racing days, in which we encouraged him. Later we heard that he was devoting his retirement to hunting, but grieving over the loss of a favourite mare. We never saw him again. But his brilliant motor racing performances, which he obviously so greatly enjoyed, a blond, tough but not very tall driver of the bigger cars, an amateur racing driver apt to be surrounded by groups of attractive, admiring girls, were part of pre-war Brooklands, and will never be erased. – W.B.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":746,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","categories":[],"tags":[22198,167,36905,34180,202,39977],"issue_decade":[121607],"issue_year":[121652],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/issue_content\/17082"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/issue_content"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/issue_content"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/746"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17082"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/issue_content\/17082\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":260739,"href":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/issue_content\/17082\/revisions\/260739"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17082"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17082"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17082"},{"taxonomy":"issue_decade","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/issue_decade?post=17082"},{"taxonomy":"issue_year","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.motorsportmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/issue_year?post=17082"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}