When Doug Saunders discovered his 1949 Bentley Mark VI, it was entombed in an underground-parking sarcophagus at a friend's condo and covered in an archeological dig's depth of accumulated dirt that masked its form so well he didn't immediately match it to the poster he'd been eyeing wistfully for three decades.
“I'd always loved them and I'd had a poster of a guy sitting on the front fender of a Mark VI since the late 1970s. But it always seemed so remote and so impossible that I'd ever have one. It was a dream,” Saunders says.
One of his automotive dreams had already come true, when he acquired his 1968 Jaguar E-Type, a car he first saw as a 14-year-old in Britain the year it was launched in 1961. And the second was about to.
“When I drove in, I didn't recognize what it was, but said to myself I must have a look at that on the way out,” says Saunders. Closer inspection soon identified it as a 1949 Bentley Mark VI that had been sitting neglected for three years.
Saunders, who lives in Oakville, Ont., tracked down the owner and began a series of coffee-shop negotiating sessions that ended with the pair sitting in the leather- and wood-trimmed back seat of the car in 2008, a deal finally struck.
“We pulled the picnic trays down from the backs of the front seats and I wrote a cheque on one of them and he wrote out the bill of sale on the other,” Saunders says.
What Saunders had purchased was an example of Bentley's first new postwar model, which had been launched in 1946, just a year before he was born.
The Bentley marque had been created by founder and aero-engine designer W.O. Bentley in 1919. Over the next decade, he created a series of sensational road-going and racing cars, including those that won the Le Mans 24-hour race four times from 1927-30.
But Bentley's operation tripped over the unravelled shoestring it had always operated on and was purchased by Rolls-Royce in 1931. The Bentley models that followed were basically somewhat sportier rebadged Rolls-Royces.
The Mark VI's mechanical specification was basically updated prewar engineering, but it featured the first factory-built steel body used by Rolls-Royce. Before this, Rolls-Royce had supplied its chassis to individual coach builders who had created bodies for them. It was shared, suitably modified, by the 1946 Silver Wraith and in 1949 by the Silver Dawn.
The Mark VI bodies were built by Pressed Steel of Coventry and mated to the chassis, trimmed and painted at Rolls-Royce's factory in the town of Crewe in Cheshire, England.
The Bentley Mark VI chassis was fitted with an independent coil-sprung front suspension, a leaf-sprung live axle rear end (rear damping could be adjusted for firmness via a steering wheel centre control) and drum brakes with R-R's unique mechanical servo assist. It also had a central lubrication system.
Power was supplied by a 4.3-litre, F-head (overhead intake, side exhaust), inline-six driving the rear wheels through a four-speed manual gearbox.
Output was, in Rolls-Royce parlance, “sufficient” to accelerate the 1,067-kilogram sedan (a current R-R Phantom weighs 2,670 kg) to 100 kilometres an hour in just over 15 seconds and to a top speed of about 160 km/h. It burned “petrol” at the rate of 16.5 miles per imperial gallon.
The Mark VI was built until 1952 and 5,202 were produced (about one fifth of them with coach-built bodies, which were still insisted on by certain wealthy and conservative customers).
Like his Bentley, Saunders also has a Rolls-Royce connection. Born in Ireland to British parents, he completed a mechanical engineering degree at Trinity College in Dublin and went to work for Rolls-Royce's aero engine operation.
