1933 Barnato Hassan Bentley

This car is the 1933 Barnato Hassan Bentley Special and was driven by Keith Schellenberg in the Richard Seaman Memorial Vintage Trophy Race at the Vintage Sports Car Club’s meeting at Oulton Park in June 1975.

Walter Hassan was a mechanic at Bentley in the 1920s at the time when their 3 litre, 4½ litre and 6.6 litre cars were a force to be reckoned with, winning the Le Mans 24 Hour race 4 years in succession from 1927 to 1930. He had been mechanic to Woolf Barnato and when the Bentley Company went into liquidation and was taken over by Rolls Royce in 1931 he went to work for Barnato. In 1933 he designed a new chassis frame and built a car round this and the 6½ litre (actually 6,597cc) engine from the Bentley ‘Old Number One’ Speed Six that won the Le Mans 24 Hour race in 1929 and 1930, and this car became known as the Barnato Hassan Special. It was raced at Brooklands, but not by Woolf Barnato who didn’t race there following the death of Clive Dunfee in a race in 1932. After serious damage to the 6½ litre engine at Brooklands in 1934 it was replaced by an 8 litre (7,983cc) unit and the car was rebuilt as a single seater in 1936, in which form Oliver Bertram lapped Brooklands with it at 143.11 mph – just short of John Cobb’s 143.44 mph in the Napier Railton.