Driving along Northern California’s coast in the rakish Bentley Speed Six Sportsman coupé, I can almost imagine that I’m Woolf Barnato, one of the original Bentley Boys—a loose association of wealthy Jazz Era cads who raced Bentleys for adventure. Barnato is the only person that entered the 24 Hours of Le Mans on more than one occasion and had a 100 percent win record, having finished first in the famed endurance race three times in the 1920s.
Barnato was such a fan of Bentley that, when the British marque found itself in deep financial trouble in 1925 (just six years after its founding), he used the ill-begotten proceeds of his family’s South African diamond mines to bail it out and become its chairman.
But Barnato is perhaps best known for racing a French locomotive in 1930, leaving the Cote d’Azur at the same time as a train, and arriving in London in his Bentley Speed Six—including a ferry ride across the English Channel—before the train pulled into its station, up north in Calais, France.
Barnato’s run is renowned not only for its speed and distance, but because it’s long rumored to have been accomplished in the very special car I’m a passenger in: a one-of-one, suicide-doored design, with an odd vestigial side-saddle rear bench behind the two narrow front seats. Presently owned by top-tier collector Bruce McCaw and valued at well over $20 million, it’s perhaps the priciest Bentley ever built.
The only thing is, in all likelihood, the race didn’t occur in this vehicle. Instead, it was probably accomplished in a more traditional-looking four-door Speed Six that Barnato also commissioned, and which is also currently owned by McCaw.
“If you prefer cold, hard facts,” says Mike Sayer, a delightfully goofy Brit who runs the brand’s product communications, and its heritage collection, “then there is good evidence that the race was run in Barnato’s black Wayman Saloon. For example, in his driving logs, Barnato described using his saloon car for the trip, and describes features of the car that this car doesn’t have but the saloon does have. Also, this car wasn’t finished until 10 weeks after the Blue Train race took place.”
The coupé’s enduring train-racing mythology derives in part from Diana Barnato-Walker, who was Woolf’s daughter, and who insisted that the race took place in this car, though she wasn’t the most reliable narrator. “She was 12 at the time of the race, and she wasn’t actually present for the race,” Sayer says, shrugging. “Also, that memory was delivered when she was quite an old lady.”
None of this reality dampens the experience of driving in this chop-roofed, three-seat vehicle bodied by coachbuilder Gurney Nutting. The car is powered by a naturally aspirated, twin-spark, overhead-cam 6.5-liter straight-six engine producing around 205 hp and what Sayer describes as, “incredible torque.”
In the fourth of its non-synchromeshed gears, at 800 rpm, the car just pulls and pulls. Its selfish cabin is redolent with notes of engine oil, horsehair, patinated leather, and hand-varnished wood. Its lovely gauges—many of which reflect arcane metrics—have an horological attention to detail. It feels like riding in a beautiful, unconventional, handmade drawing room, like something at the Bloomsbury group’s Charleston farmhouse.
More than this, the one-off two-door is foundational to Bentley from a design perspective. “If you look at our design DNA, this is probably its genesis,” Sayer says. He points to many of the car’s aesthetic choices, including its proportions, lines, and massing. Up front, there’s a very upright and dominant front end, with big round headlamps. The hood is incredibly long and louvered, and hosts a character line that starts at the radiator shell and runs along the side of the car, all the way to the trunk lid. There’s a muscular haunch over the rear wheel, giving it a poised sense of potential energy. And out back, one can see glimpses of the Bentley “Prestigious Shield” rear, which is all about the way the car slopes down and then terminates.
These details can be traced directly from this car, through nearly 100 years of Bentleys, to the current Continental GT and Flying Spur, and (to a lesser degree) the awkward Bentayga. Sayer even credits it as an influence on the brand’s recent EXP 15 concept, which seems like an insult to this coupé.
At the end of our drive, I ask Sayer if he’s nervous driving someone else’s eight-figure car on public roads. He talks about the innate and long-term trust between McCaw and the Bentley team, and all manner of insurance precautions. But he mentions an ace in the hole as well. “We’re actually going to return it in better condition than it arrived,” he says, “because we did some work to it.”
The car’s complex, finicky, and obviously archaic fuel gauge was stuck, and the team at McCaw’s collection couldn’t fix it. “While it was in the U.K., we got it to our specialists, who managed to figure out what was wrong with it.” What was wrong with it was not exactly technical, or perhaps too technical for me. “They just had to replace some stuff,” Sayer says. “And clean up some other bits. Now it’s better than new.”
Click here for more photos of Woolf Barnato’s Bentley Speed Six “Blue Train” Sportsman coupé.
