A real man’s car..

and the stuff of greenie nightmares…45 litres, 2.7 tons… the funniest road test ever.
Packard-engined Bentley
‘…Even starting the beast is intimidating. I ask Chris to run through the cockpit drill. It looks like something that should be attacking shipping convoys in the Atlantic approaches.
“The dashboard is primarily aircraft specification,” he says. “There’s the famous Packard brake-horsepower indicator, which goes up to 2,000bhp. Over here we’ve got the fuel-tank and fuel-pressure gauges. The starting system consists of a trembler coil that gives a whole sheet of sparks into the distributor so something will catch somewhere and that’s activated with two buttons on the side of the main binnacle. There’s the dual magnetos for each bank of cylinders and these switches are their over rides, plus various advance and retards and ignition checking systems. The fire button under the steering wheel is actually a fire button off a Spitfire. Here are various temperature gauges for oil and coolant and that bank of fuel switches is for the feed and the return fuel pumps, which drain the scavenge tank into the main tank, or top up the scavenge tank. Oh and down here is the ‘James Bond’ panel, with the boost gauge, which shows the suction as well, plus more oil temperature gauges and the overlocks for the solenoids on the fuel priming system…’