Continuing the line

Bicester Heritage and Kingsbury Racing just fit. The sight and sound of a racing green Bentley roaring through the avenues is as familiar today as it would have been when the red-brick buildings were new.

The site pre-dates WO’s eponymous marque by two years – the Royal Flying Corps moved in in 1917 and Bentley moved in to Cricklewood in 1919; both served during the Second World War; and both have found brighter futures this side of the millennium.

Yet Bentley’s presence at Bicester through expert specialist Ewen Getley and Kingsbury happened more by chance than good judgement.

“I was doing cars one at a time in a shed, with just about enough money to put food on the table and pay the school fees,” Ewen explains in his treasure trove of an office overlooking the workshop floor. “Then the chap wanted the shed back and I thought, ‘Where am I going to go?’ So, I just Googled places to rent and Bicester Heritage came up. They were starting this new place with a vintage Bentley racer signed up, so I called the number and met Dan by the gate. I asked who that was and Dan said: ‘You.’”

Ewen took one of the five buildings that had been preserved and restored in the initial development, but first impressions of current home at the Engine Fitting Shop required him to look past what stood in front of him.

A temporary stay in Building 102 yielded Ewen his first staff member, too, the first in a series of unintended consequences of calling Bicester Heritage home. “I was working away and this chap sticks his head around the door looking for work experience two days a week,” recalls Ewen. “Matthew has been working for me ever since. I wasn’t planning on employing anyone at all, but I realised I could do with another pair of hands. I’ve never even looked [for staff]; they’ve just turned up, apart from Dave the machinist. If anyone comes in here and shows initiative, then it works.

“Catherine, who is skilled in CNC, has been with us for four or five years. When she started she didn’t know a lot about Bentleys but she was an apprentice CNC programmer so on day one she could earn us some money, Dave could add to her skills and her problem-solving abilities did the rest.”

The brilliant engineers and craftsmen of Cricklewood working when these cars were new would be stunned by such a machine. It relentlessly works away at the rear of the Engine Fitting Shop under Catherine's expert eye – Kingsbury is a precision engineering workshop that just happens to work on old cars, Ewen is at pains to point out.

“I would suggest to anyone who wants to work in old cars, just start making stuff on machines,” he offers. “Even if the car business won’t give you any work, somebody else will. Start in engineering, not necessarily in old cars, and then you’ll find somebody in the old car business will snap you up.

"Automotive engineering is a bit of a blind alley, so study physics, like Robin [Tuluie of PhysicsX]. Then you can go and do everything from rockets to wind turbines or cars. He was chief scientist of Mercedes Grand Prix, head of engineering at Bentley, but never studied engineering. Find something that can translate – like CNC.”

That computer-aided work is made unimaginably easier thanks to a late piece of forethought when Bentley was being wound up in 1931: the records and engineering drawings of these cars remain to this day. They are as priceless to Kingsbury as they are Bentley.

“They’ve been properly scanned,” Ewen explains, “so they don’t pixelate too quickly. When they closed the factory in 1931 they’d opened a service department in Kingsbury – hence why we’re called Kingsbury – and when they were throwing everything on the bonfire they took one set of everything in case they needed them.

“The drawing for the supercharger doesn't exist any more, though, but what was produced and what was drawn were two different things. Dimensionally it would have been from the drawing, but the actual shape was from a chisel and sanding block – the elements that make the draught angles and compound radii that make the form and beauty. Francis Galashan scanned one for us and we used that to make a mould so it looks absolutely right. The drawing would have looked boxy and strange, so that’s where 3D scanning really has its use. The rest is by drawing.”

This experience has been capitalised upon by Bentley today, bringing the expertise Bentley had lost through the years back to its inhouse ‘vintage’ cars. In 2019, Bentley revealed plans to create 12 new ‘Blowers’, the supercharged cars championed by racer ‘Tim’ Birkin, and to disassemble it original car to 3D scan to ensure the copies are exact.

Ewen self-deprecatingly defers to Bicester Heritage for him becoming involved in the project. “Bentley CEO Adrian Hallmark and others were here with Dan, and happened to stick their heads in. They’d never have come to my shed three miles away. It would only ever have been here. That was the only reason I was asked to quote. I wasn’t going to until Robert Glover came in and told me to. So I went away and over the weekend wrote out: ‘Engine: price. Supercharger: price. Gearbox: price.’ That was it.

“They came back and said we can’t give you the engine but we’d like to talk to you about the gearbox. I went to see them and they asked me to knock a bit of money off, and I did. They then said: ‘What about the front axle?’ We’ve ended up making the whole front axle assembly, the brakes, the gearbox, the propshaft, the rear differential and the back axle.

“We bed the brakes in on the mill, because we built a jig so the brakes are done before they’re even fitted to the car. You’re on to 95% braking efficiency immediately, which we like because the brakes are notoriously difficult to bed in.”

All of the components are created in the Engine Fitting Shop, and one thing has led to another Continuation car project: the Speed Six. “We’re now doing the engine, too” Ewen says. “We started by making a list of parts – there’s two and a half thousand. Then you work out how you are going to make those parts or where you are going to get them from.”

In the Incendiary Store, Kingsbury's second building at Bicester Heritage, are trays and trays of perfectly formed components, the majority of which have been created from blocks of material by Kingsbury.

“The mistake that people make with engineering is that they think it is impossible, if you look at an enormous task, like building an engine or sending a rocket to the moon, you wouldn’t know where to start. It’s just lots of small steps. It’s lots of little challenges which you break into its constituent parts.”

The team’s attention to detail meant on the first attempt they hit the horsepower target set by Bentley. “We put the fuel in, pressed the button and it started straight away. No dramas, no adjustments; be picky and it should start on the button. We’d put so much into it.”

The Continuation cars were contentious at first, with owners of original cars cynical of the project but Ewen is in no doubt of its value. “The people who buy them already have Bentleys,” he points out. “The first one off the line went to one of our customers, who has a matching numbers supercharged car and a one-off 8 Litre. He now rags it around the Pampas in South America. With the Continuation, you actually get to see them on the road. And that is a good thing.

“Vintage Bentleys have a good future because they’re from a good brand, like Bugattis and Alfa Romeos. They always will. Bentleys have always been desirable, and of the 3000 made 2000 still exist.

“Really,” Ewen says of his connection to the brand, “we’re lucky to have Bentley."

The feeling is undoubtedly mutual.