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Bentley preps 'Centennary Specification' for all models built in 2019

For the entirety of Bentley's 100th year in business, the English carmaker will adorn its products with a Centenary Specification. The package consists of unique badging with specially developed Centenary Gold badge highlights, available Centenary Gold thread for the headrest logos, contrast stitching and cross stitching, and a "centenary welcome light" outside the vehicle. The in-house craftsmen have also developed unique embroidery. Bentley says the gold hue was inspired by metalwork on vintage models like the 1919 EXP 2 (pictured, red and silver) and 1929 Birkin Blower (pictured, green), the latter one of the company's Le Mans winners driven by Sir Henry "Tim" Birkin. The hue possesses an "elegant warm tone and a deep fluid shadow." The steering wheel badge, key fob, shift knob, and wheel center caps feature the tinted ring. The "B" badge on the radiator surround also features "1919-2019" script, and that script is found on the tread plates, too. For those who don't know, eponymous founder Walter Owen Bentley's engineering career began with locomotives — which he loved more than cars at one point — and motorcycles, before settling on automobiles. He bought his first car in 1910, a French DFP, and after improving it himself, set a 10-lap record at the Brooklands circuit. In 1912 he opened a DFP franchise with his brother Horace Milner as Bentley & Bentley, and further upgraded the car with a new piston design that was 88 percent aluminum and 12 percent copper. The Royal Naval Air Service adopted Bentley's piston design and Bentley's re-designed Clerget airplane engines, dubbed the Bentley Rotary. After the war, Bentley refocused on cars, and in 1919 released the 3-Litre, which boasted features like a cross-flow head, overhead cams working four valves per cylinder, and twin plugs in each cylinder. The company delivered the first production model in 1921, then went racing and won the second edition of Le Mans in 1924. That is how Bentley began to become "Bentley, ahem ...", and here we are. Next year, on July 10, the company plans to celebrate the feat appropriately. Related Video:

Gliding on the ice at Bentley's fantasy camp

It was just before 2:00 PM when I landed in Helsinki, bleary-eyed and more than slightly disoriented, after a late-night departure from New York and an early-morning connection in Amsterdam. I was staring at the departures board. There was one more flight to go before I could join Bentley for Power on Ice, its annual ice driving experience in the northerly town of Kuusamo, but there was a problem: There were two HEL-KAO flights on the board, both slated to leave at 4:30, and it was impossible to discern which was Bentley's chartered flight to the alpine ski area. Nonplussed and unable to utter a word in Finnish, I approached a gate agent with rudimentary English to see if she knew which flight was mine. "I'm sorry, sir," she said in an Finnish take on the Omaha dialect, "Your plane does not seem to exist." I winced. Of course it didn't. "My" plane was way out on the tarmac, far away from proletariat jumbo jets, accessible only through a gate that the automaker had staffed and commandeered for the afternoon. It was an auspicious start to three days of attending Bentley's exclusive fantasy camp for its affluent super-fans, which purportedly exists to answer the question: What can you give the Bentley fan who already has everything? For drivers more accustomed to making graceful entries and exits in their posh vehicles, several days of power sliding on a private track more than suffices. You need not be a Bentley owner to participate in the program, but an aficionado of the brand with some cash burning a pretty big hole in the pocket. For the better part of a decade, Bentley has decamped to Kuusamo, the town located just south of the Arctic Circle, to prove the British performance bona-fides of its lineup on 19 square miles of frozen Kuusamojarvi lake, as part of the wintertime Power on Ice event. The program satisfies the need of high-end performance enthusiasts who want something different than arriving at another five-star hotel for another weekend of good eating, drinking, and relaxing. Plenty of brands assert that they have a bespoke answer for discerning customers, but Power on Ice is truly different. You need not be a Bentley owner to participate in the program, but an aficionado of the brand with some cash burning a pretty big hole in the pocket.

Bentley officially returns to racing at Gulf 12hr

For a company with a tendency to name its cars after parts of the Circuit de la Sarthe like Arnage and Mulsanne, Bentley sure has been gone from endurance sportscar racing for a long time. It famously won the 24 Hours of Le Mans five times in the 1920s, but didn't come back until 68 years later to win again in 2003. That was the last time Bentley competed on the world stage... until now.
Bentley first revealed its rekindled racing ambitions with the Continental GT3 at the 2012 Paris Motor Show. The car would be developed for privateer racers, and that's all led up to this point. Team M-Sport, which you may know better for having run Ford's World Rally Championship team, was charged with developing the car, and it entered the new racecar this past weekend in the Gulf 12 Hours in Abu Dhabi. There, on the Yas Marina Circuit in the United Arab Emirates, the Continental GT3 diced it with GT3 versions of the likes of the Ferrari 458, Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG and McLaren 12C.
So how did it fare on its first time out? Well the race is split into two six-hour sessions, and the Conti finished third in the first heat (behind the AF Corse Ferrari and Black Falcon Benz) and fourth in the second (just edged out by another 458 entered by Kessel Racing). Not a bad outcome for Bentley's first race in a decade. And the Abu Dhabi race was essentially a dress rehearsal for next season when the Continental GT3 will be entered in the full 2014 Blancpain Endurance Series.