Tech - News
A Bentley Icon Is Being Reborn In Painstaking Detail
By DAVE MCQUILLING
The Speed Six was one of Bentley’s most successful and iconic cars, winning LeMans twice, once in 1929 and again in 1930. Only 326 Speed Sixes were initially produced, but they were built on a variety of different chassis and at different lengths to match the requirements of individual customers — for instance, in 1928, the car had three different choices of wheelbase.
Bentley has announced, after 92 years, it is going to assemble a limited run of 13 cars that will be painstakingly assembled to match the original Speed Six units. One of these, the Car Zero, will remain in the hands of the company, but the other 12 will cost upwards of $1.838 million each and have already been reserved by a dozen lucky buyers from around the world.
The 12 cars will be hand-built by Bentley's Mulliner team and an “incredible array of artisans from a number of automotive heritage specialists across the U.K.,” according to the automaker. Reproduction parts will be as accurate to the originals as possible, and Bentley even claims that many of the parts will be “crafted using the same techniques used in the 1920s.”
It's part of a move by several automakers with lengthy histories to revisit some of the classic models which helped build their legacies. Back in 2016, for example, Jaguar revealed its first "new" XKSS to be built in almost six decades. Bentley has announced that production of the first Continuation Series Speed Six is expected to begin later in 2022.