Indeed, even when a 3-Litre was displayed at London’s motor show that November, its engine remained incomplete under a locked bonnet.
Not that Walter was some naive amateur – far from it. Educated as a railway engineer, he had joined the automotive industry aged 24 back in 1912, he and his brother Horace Millner Bentley becoming the sole UK dealers for French firm DFP. He had started tinkering straight away, upgrading the cars’ engines in order to break speed records and win races, earning high praise from Autocar.
Chief among the modifications was weight-saving aluminium for the pistons – his inspiration being a paperweight that he saw in DFP’s Paris factory. Of course, war then broke out, and Walter suggested to officials that his techniques be put to military use – leading to him designing the rotary engines used in Sopwith’s famous fighter planes.
You might assume royalties from this funded the post-war foundation of Bentley Motors, but Walter was rewarded a “pittance” of £8000 for it, and that only after a “beastly and tiresome” court case. Helping rather more was a boom in car sales: Horace’s team brought in some £20k from DFP sales in 1920 alone.
But there was another side to this: car factories and suppliers had no need for new clients, meaning that, in Walter’s words, “to design and build a new car in 1919 without substantial capital was like being cast on a desert island with a penknife and orders to build a house”.
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