Meet the specialist: Vintage Bentley

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One of the difficulties of old-car ownership is the question of spares and maintenance. Are the spares available? If so, are they good or are they poor-quality junk? As for the maintenance, it may be straightforward but do you have time? These are the questions which lead so many people to abandon their aspirations of owning an old car, but with vintage Bentleys such reservations need not apply.

William Medcalf is well-known as the proprietor of Vintage Bentley, but what people might not realize is that Vintage Bentley is more than just a sales and restoration business - it's a one-stop shop for all things W. O.

Born into Bentleys

William's earliest memories of Bentleys stem from when he was five years old. As he explains, "My father was a toolmaker and he took a liking to a Three-Litre Bentley which he rebuilt on the kitchen table. When it was done, he wanted to test it, so as a family we went to America and drove 28,000 miles in nine months. That was in the days without sat-nav, without mobiles 'phones... We went through Death Valley, picked oranges at the orange groves in Florida, swam in rivers during the ice melt in Vermont and ran with truckers with CB radio who'd be radioing ahead about this mad English family. It inspired me to travel and work on and understand these cars."

However, when the Medcalfs returned from America, they sold the Three-Litre. Says William, "With five people in it, it was too slow, so we bought a Speed Six which has been in the family for 44 years." That Speed Six wears exquisite Martin Walter sports saloon bodywork, but William now has a Three-Litre saloon for running his family around in.

When William reached working age, he planned to become a toolmaker in the plastics industry, but his father encouraged him to work on the cars he'd grown to love, and so, in 1997, that's exactly what he started to do. "It was a very simple start," he recalls. "It was just me and a bag of spanners." To start with, he was working out of a row of garages in Edmonton, north London, but in 2012 he moved to much larger, better-equipped premises near Liss, on the Hampshire and Sussex border. Relocating meant starting again from scratch in many ways but Vintage Bentley now employs 30 people.

A global operation

William says that it's grown organically and wants to get bigger still, but "After 11 years we've totally filled every space, so we'll have to grow a bit more. Global expansion is next. There are other territories where we do a lot of business and we think they'd appreciate it if we were a bit more local."

The showroom contains around six or seven cars at any given time. Currently, there are some 4½-Litre tourers and a 1924 3/4½-Litre special rebuilt in the 1960s in fetching purple and orange paint. All very lovely, but you can't beat original bodywork so we're drawn to the last surviving 4½-Litre Freestone & Webb saloon and an extraordinarily beautiful 6½-Litre Harrison-bodied coupé. "We can have a car for less than a day or over a year. There’s no rhyme or reason,” William remarks. “Ultimately, everything gets sold. It just needs the right person to find the right car."

Behind the scenes, Vintage Bentley is a place where the past meets the future. In the machine shop, machinists hand-make brand-new parts just as they did 100 years ago, but more modern methods are used as well. If Vintage Bentley was to rebuild a car from scratch, around 65 per cent of its parts would be made in-house. That includes the bolts, which W. O. Bentley decided should combine metric heads with imperial threads.

Keeping history alive at Le Mans

The main workshop is a hive of activity. Services offered include full restorations, event preparation and servicing, and race and rally preparation. At the time of our visit, the main focus is on preparing cars for the Le Mans Classic, which this year celebrates 100 years of the Le Mans 24-Hour Race. Benjafield's Racing Club will be staging a one-hour race with a grid of 75 Bentleys. Of those, 26 will have been prepared by Vintage Bentley, and 32 of the drivers are clients. The workshop currently contains original Bentley team cars from 1923, 1925, 1927 and 1930, all of which will be racing at Le Mans. Significantly, John Duff's 1923 car and the 1927 car, which retired from the race as a result of the infamous White House crash, have never raced again at Le Mans until now.

If long-distance rallies are your thing, Vintage Bentley has built 10 cars for the Peking-Paris, in which they have won their class, and its cars have won the Flying Scotsman three times. Vintage Bentley is not only able to tune a 4½-Litre engine to produce 230bhp where originally it produced 120, it can also upgrade the back axles to withstand that power. Where parts are known to have weaknesses, it remakes them to its own improved designs for durability and longevity.

Vintage Bentley is also pioneering the use of synthetic fuels. It can claim to have had the first Bentley to race using synthetic fuel, the first Bentley to win a race using synthetic fuel and the first Bentley to compete in the Mille Miglia using synthetic fuel. The P1 fuel is made from biomass, hydrogen and carbon captured from the atmosphere, and has powered the Bentleys without them missing a beat, a breakthrough which ought to guarantee the safety of the historic vehicle movement going into the future.

Now that you know all that, if you're in the market for a Cricklewood Bentley, what’s stopping you? No matter what you need, Vintage Bentley should have you covered. Why not take a look at some of the cars it has in stock?

Words and photographs: Zack Stiling
 

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