Peking To Paris Rally, 2012

"I was the navigator(?) with Bill Binnie on the 1997 Peking to Paris as well as on the drive from Maine to Pebble Beach soon thereafter. There are cherished memories of guiding the 1928 4.5 Litre Bentley through many hard miles.

I fondly remember the thirty-four round trips Bill and I took back and forth from Portsmouth, New Hampshire to Cochranville, Pennsylvania and Dave George's restoration shop. We compressed a full body off restoration into eight months under Dave's sage leadership. We were still fettling the car as we drove it to JFK for departure to Beijing - it now obviously fully sorted having circumnavigated the Northern Hemisphere.

Going through my office recently, I came across a bevy of information and pictures of the car in various states. I didn't know if you might like to have some of this to add to your collection of information regarding PM3262."

William Binnie's 1928 4½ Liter is a regularly aspirated car that started out life with a saloon body by George Maddox & Sons of Huntingdon, and rebodied in 1935 with the classic VdP tourer body it sports today. But it wasn't just any old coachbuilder that did this job: Look closely at the badge on the steering wheel hub, and you'll see a badge that reads "H.M. Bentley and Partners, Hanover Street W."

After Bentley Motors went into receivership in 1931 and was taken over by rival Rolls-Royce, H.M. had a career as a successful builder of sporting bodies, and did some of his finest work on W.O.'s chassis. He rebodied four 4½ Liters, and perhaps eight or nine Bentleys in all. Binnie's car is rare, in that it's a four-seater; it was equipped with a factory racing team fuel tank, a D-Type racing gearbox, and a higher-geared differential from a wrecked Blower Bentley. When Rolls-Royce liquidated Bentley in 1932 and sold off its stockpiles of parts, H.M. apparently bought up the stash of racing items.

Binnie, who has long been involved in all forms of modern and historic motorsports (he won the Le Mans Prototype 2 championship in 2004 and won his class in the 2004 Historic Le Mans race in his 1965 Ford GT-40), bought the car in 1996 to take part in a re-running of the 1907 Peking-to-Paris rally. More about that in a bit; first, let's go for a ride.

Approaching the car, the first thought is that this is one large automobile, about as aerodynamic as a Victorian mahogany sideboard, and probably better built. For this 5-foot-10 editor, the radiator filler cap was at about mid-sternum height. The Bentley turns out to be easier to climb up and into than you might think; by stepping on one of the massive side trunks and swinging our legs over the cut-down door, we avoid getting fingerprints all over the polished chrome door handle. Once inside, the view over the little racing windscreen and the long, aluminum hood is memorable.

There's the deep sound of the starter motor, like a basso profundo clearing his throat, and the engine comes to life, settling quickly into a slow, smooth tickover. It's a pleasantly mechanical sound, and the whirring of the camshaft's beveled gears harmonizes nicely with the regular bass beats of the exhaust. If there's any valve clatter, it's masked by a beefy alloy valve cover that could be melted down to make a couple of Audi A8s.

We rumbled down the driveway as Binnie explained the shifting procedure: Get into fourth as quickly as possible, and leave it there. Thanks to the design of the gearbox, the first, second and third gears produced a significant racket, but top gear was dead silent. The big four, with its 140mm stroke, provided seemingly unlimited amounts of torque at even the lowest rpm; at 40 mph, a lazy 1,400 rpm showed on the saucer-sized tachometer. With so much torque on hand, we can only imagine what the later 8 Liter straight-six might be capable of-uprooting mature oak trees, most likely.

Bugatti, whose tough yet graceful cars were frequent opponents of the big Bentleys on the tracks of the day, once famously derided W.O.'s cars as the world's fastest trucks, but we wouldn't call this ride trucklike. The suspension is certainly a little stiff, but it's softened by the flex of the chassis and the spring in the cushions. The engine's pleasant growl, the wind rushing by and the lofty seating position make this a ride unlike any other. Rare is the 78-year-old car that can be driven without any modifications, and Binnie has made a few in the interest of driveability. The 4½ Liter sports an alternator, an electric cooling fan, a pair of SU carburetors made for a 1950s Jaguar and a Laycock overdrive unit from a London bus.

Binnie was happy to drive the 4½ Liter along the secondary highways around the New Hampshire seacoast. The mechanical brakes pulled the car up without any drama-we weren't going to be leaving any flattened Kias in our wake-but do require a shove. "By and large, I've always found the car comfortable to drive," he said. "You can comfortably drive at 60 mph with one hand on the wheel. I've spent 12 to 14 hours in the car on any given day and have been able to get out of the car without being overly tired. The same cannot be said of a Bugatti."

He should know. Is there a more driven vintage Bentley to be found anywhere? Binnie completed the Peking-to-Paris rally in 1997, the first time the event had been held since the original 90 years earlier, and drove the car to a gold medal-the oldest car in the rally so honored. Imagine-a car nearly seven decades old ran over hundreds of miles of the most primitive roads, forded rushing streams, and conquered some of the world's highest mountain ranges, scaling a 20,000-foot pass in the Himalayas and coming within five miles of the base camp for Mount Everest. The pounding shook fenders loose, unscrewed light bulbs and put a four-inch crack in the frame, but the engine needed only to have its carburetor jets swapped out for the higher altitudes. "The car really took incredible abuse," he said. He's driven the car from Maine to Laguna Seca, where he's raced it in at the Monterey Historics, and to Pebble Beach, where it's been shown on the 18th green. He could throw a "This Car Climbed Mt. Washington" sticker on the bumper, too, if he wanted.

"There are very few mechanical things this old that can be used every day," Binnie said. "In fact, I can't think of another." In the end, not a bad compliment for a remarkable car.

Owner's View
William Binnie of Rye, New Hampshire, bought this 4½ Liter in 1996 with the intention of entering the 1997 Peking to Paris rally. "I have driven the car across the Gobi desert and to Lhasa, over the Himalayas and within 50 miles of the Everest base camp, taken it up to 20,000 feet and taken it across the Friendship Bridge from China to Nepal, becoming one of the first Westerners to do that. It took us more than two months to do that, and we worked on the car every day. When we got back, we spent months stripping the car down to every last bolt. When you do that, you get a special bond with a car, and it doesn't matter if it's a Bentley or a Volvo.

"I've driven it over the Alps, over the Rockies, the Appalachians, the Whites, the Greens and the Sierra Nevadas. I've driven it up the highest peak in New England, Mount Washington."

Binnie in 1999 received the Spirit of the Automobile award at the Monterey Historic Automobile Races, in part for the number of events he's done with the Bentley. "Short of my winning Le Mans (he's the 2004 LMP-2 champion), that's my proudest achievement," he said. "We've really done a lot of stuff with this car. It's my favorite car of the 30 or so that I own. I just really appreciate what a wonderful old thing it is."

Mail 1
"I do have a couple more pics and a copy of a South African hair gel advert from the 1950s in which my father Jimmy Culverwell's car was used after he had sold it."

Mail 2
"Looking again at the Tru-gel ad and 'our' Bentley, I see that the flippy-up mini windshield thingies look different. That's an old Durban registration on the car in the gel ad, and the Bentley Memorial Foundation (from whom I received the photo) told me he'd sold it to a fella in Durban, but who knows! Maybe I should raise that with them, they should check it."

"Regarding 1928 Bentley 4.5 Litre Chassis No. PM3262 and Engine No. PM3259, Registration No. EW 5578.

My dad owned this car in South Africa in the late 1940s. I don't know when he purchased it, but my late cousin said he stripped and rebuilt it in Johannesburg upon his return in 1945 from an Italian POW camp, then took it off to Swaziland where he resided (and I was born) until his death in 1965. He sold it on to a Mr Phipps of Durban when he married my English mother around 1950/1.

My information on the vehicle was obtained through Mr Alan Bodfish of the Bentley Memorial Foundation in 2012."