Bentley has unveiled the EXP 15, a new concept that provides a scintillating first look at its new era. A high-riding limousine, it actually takes inspiration from the 'Blue Train', a special driven by Bentley Boy Woolf Barnato in the 1930s.
In this feature from 2014, Steve Cropley visits some of Barnato's favourite haunts in the Blue Train. This is what it feels like to thread it through London's side streets...
The Bentley Boys are back in town
The point of owning a special car, owners say, is that you can use it to do special things. However, for Woolf Barnato, 35-year-old double Le Mans winner and owner of Bentley Motors in the spring of 1930, the usual order of things was reversed: he had an activity in mind but needed the car. What he did about that created, over the next 84 years, the curious tale of the Bentley Blue Train.
Barnato had inherited his father’s South African diamond mining fortune and was a prominent member of London’s car-mad social scene. The task he set himself had already been well publicised. Both a Rover and an Alvis had recently raced and beaten the famous Blue Train, the French express known for assisting England’s wealthy to ‘winter’ on the French Riviera. However, each had merely beaten the train by minutes, and from the bar of the Hotel Carlton in Cannes, Barnato decided a Bentley could do much better. He bet £100 that he could leave with the Blue Train and be parked outside his London club by the time it reached Calais. On 13 March, with his friend Dale Bourne riding shotgun, he set off just before 6pm in his Bentley Speed Six to prove it.
Near Lyons the pair was slowed by heavy rain. At Auxerre they lost time searching for a fuelling point. Further north they encountered dense fog and burst a tyre, but they still made the Boulogne cross-channel ferry at 10.30am and reached London in the early afternoon, parking outside the Conservative Club in St James’s Street four minutes before the Blue Train steamed into Calais station at 3.54pm. Barnato collected his £100 but was fined considerably more by furious French authorities for racing on public roads. And in a fascinating link between law enforcement and commerce, the French organisers also managed to prevent Bentley from exhibiting cars at the Paris Salon later that year – but nothing could affect the fame of the legendary ‘Blue Train’ Bentley.
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