Piero Rivolta inherited a car company the way nobody should inherit anything - suddenly, at twenty-four, in the middle of a product expansion that his father had set in motion and would never see completed. Renzo Rivolta died in 1966 of a heart attack, and the baton passed to a
British Cars
Somewhere between the last gasps of Britain's post-war industrial confidence and the dawning realisation that American V8 muscle had fundamentally redrawn the world's expectations of performance luxury, Bentley quietly laid a six-cylinder engine to rest. The straight-six that had powered the S1 - an engine whose
Rolls-Royce never told anyone how powerful it was. Not in 1959, when it first appeared beneath the bonnet of the Silver Cloud II and Bentley S2, and not decades later when it was still turning out cars under entirely different ownership structures. The official position - that power output was
The cruelest thing about badge engineering in postwar Britain is that it worked, right up until the moment it didn't. For two decades, the British Motor Corporation sold essentially the same cars under Austin, Morris, Riley, Wolseley, MG, and Vanden Plas badges, and the public - at least
Before the motor car existed to carry it, the idea had already been alive for two centuries - in silk-upholstered carriages jolting south through the Mont Cenis Pass, in the bags of young English aristocrats packed for Rome, Florence, and Venice, in the civilised assumption that covering great distances with
At the 1959 Earls Court Motor Show, Hooper & Co. stood their final exhibit - four cars on the stand, including a Bentley S2 built on the very first S2 Continental chassis to leave Crewe. It was body number 10294, the last bespoke coachwork the firm would ever complete. The
British Cars
If you wanted to buy a Bristol in 1966, the car didn't come to you - you came, by appointment, to the small showroom at Kensington High Street, where the proprietor Tony Crook might personally assess whether you were the sort of person deserving of one. That singular,
The engineers at Friedrichshafen had spent the first half of the twentieth century making gears for Zeppelin airships, then transmissions for automobiles, then weapons components for a government they had no particular enthusiasm for, and then transmissions for automobiles again. By the time the postwar grand-touring market began demanding that
Britain emerged from the Second World War having invented several methods of killing people at altitude with remarkable efficiency, and the Bristol Aeroplane Company at Filton emerged from it in possession of something even more unusual: a genuinely transferable industrial philosophy. When the government's postwar contraction of the
When the locks were changed on the Kensington High Street showroom in August 2007, Tony Crook arrived for work as he had done for decades, found the door would not open, and was told, at eighty-seven, that his services were no longer required. It was a conclusion so bathetically at
The peculiar genius of London's boutique British motor trade in its postwar golden age was that it treated the act of selling cars as a minor inconvenience to the business of maintaining standards. On Kensington High Street, at Piccadilly, along the fringes of Mayfair, a loose constellation of
When Malcolm Sayer tilted the XK straight-six eight and a half degrees from vertical inside the D-Type's engine bay, the resulting asymmetric bonnet bulge became one of the most honest pieces of bodywork in racing history - a direct external signature of an internal engineering decision, the aerodynamicist&