Southern Tablelands Heritage Automotive Restorers Club Inc.

Home	About us	Our magazine	Coming events	Recent events	Our vehicles	Links	Contact us
10^th Anniversary Dinner July 2011	Car of the Month

Lawrie and Jane Nock’s 1966 Bentley T Coupe

Article and photos by Lawrie and Jane Nock.

1966 Bentley T Coupe

We have put up a fairly good image of Rolls-Royce enthusiasts. It wasn’t all my fault. If Jane hadn’t pushed me I would probably have been content to just look at cars and perhaps have just one – well that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

After acquiring Jane’s S2 Bentley and a Silver Shadow series Rolls, we had as many old cars as we could drive at any one time and that should have been enough. In fact it was enough. In years gone by I had often joked with car rental staff about getting a Rolls-Royce Corniche convertible (as I thought them to be at that time) for my transport when working. Some staff actually knew what I was talking about, most had no idea. Until we went to buy our first Rolls, I don’t think I had ever actually seen a real version of the car. I continued to test the knowledge of other owners, especially members of the Rolls-Royce Owners Club by suggesting that our standard steel body 4 door Silver Shadow might actually be a Corniche drophead (the description by which I had by then worked out was how they were properly identified). I also made the mistake of telling the same story to our friend in Sydney.

In lieu of a Rolls Corniche Drophead I had acquired a sports car in the form of a Mercedes 450 SLC. A very nice car which was nearly but not yet quite into the historic category. We drove it a fair bit, but we did discover that it was not quite as accessible for us as it would have been 20 or 30 years earlier. In my dotage, I really needed a sports car. It was a long time since I had owned one and a car of this type might have restored my youth. The Mercedes had only succeeded in displaying my loss of youth so, if I was going to have a sports car, it had to be more accommodating.

Well meaning friends counselled me against the drophead version of the car. Although the Corniche was perhaps the pinnacle of the marque’s general public presence, the security and maintenance issues associated with such a car are, I was warned, considerable. Without a roof to keep the rain out, these cars have the potential to become an open bucket which then leads to serious rust problems. It is virtually impossible to secure a soft top vehicle of any marquee. I have discovered that many owners leave their cars open and unlocked so that the sociopaths in our community do not have to destroy the roof to steal what they may fancy. That of course doesn’t stop mindless vandalism.

We had seen our friend driving quite a nice looking T series Bentley when we had visited him at his warehouse in Sydney. We didn’t know enough about the marque to appreciate much other than that it looked nice. When I mentioned the drophead Corniche concept yet again, our friend told me that he had been asked by the current owner to sell the Bentley T coupe. This car when fitted with Dayton wire wheels would in deed be a desirable sports car. The car had also been fitted with an LPG conversion giving it both long range and an economic fuel choice if it was to be used for regular runs or long distance travel. We didn’t need much convincing.

The T series Bentley was released in 1965 along with its stable mate the Silver Shadow Rolls-Royce. These series were described by many as the first modern cars to come out of Rolls-Royce in nearly 50 years. They were the benchmark in automotive engineering in 1965. Features such as 4 wheel disc brakes and all round independent suspension are technologies which did not make their way into some marques until several decades later. The collapsible steering column and multi circuit braking system were also innovations well before their time as far as many other manufacturers were concerned. Air conditioning, electric seat adjustment, electric windows and central locking were designed in as standard features. It could have been that Rolls-Royce were merely trying to find out how much money they could spend making a motor car, but the most likely explanation is that for Roll-Royce the primary market was the USA and such features were needed if the car was to compete against the best of what America had to offer the customer at the top end of the market.

Virtually as soon as Roll-Royce had successfully produced their standard body 4 door saloon they recognized a need to have a much more expensive and therefore exclusive model to offer to their more discriminating customers. A 4 door car was despatched to the Roll-Royce owned Mulliner Park Ward body building factory for conversion to a two door coupe. The exercise was successful and a much more exclusive and of course more expensive version of the car was born. The removal of the rear door was accompanied by a slight Coca Cola bottle hip over the rear wheel arch which gives the car a distinctive and attractive line. This design concept was probably borrowed from the Silver Cloud and S series vehicles which were first produced in the mid 1950s but was good enough to carry through on the subsequent Corniche designs to the mid 1990s. The first of the two door cars emerged in 1966 as a hardtop coupe and in 1967 Mulliner produced the same car as an even more expensive drophead coupe.

One of the last remaining outside body builders, James Young also had a go at building a two door version of the Shadow series Rolls but their version, which while being much more rare is not as attractive as the Mulliner Park Ward bodied car.

By the mid 1960s, many people had recognized that the Bentley was merely a rebadged version of the Rolls-Royce of the day, or vice versa. The market swung towards the Rolls-Royce badged vehicles and over the next decade or so the Bentley marque almost disappeared. As a consequence, relatively few of the special bodied Bentleys were ordered and produced. Our Bentley is one of just 98 cars produced between 1966 and 1971, and only 79 of those cars were built in right hand drive configuration. In 1971, the same bodies were released in the form of a significantly different model the Bentley and Rolls-Royce Corniche.

The running gear was the same as for the 4 door versions of the car. The 6.23 litre twin SU carburetion V8 engine was matched up to a 4 speed automatic transmission of General Motors design but was built under licence by Rolls-Royce. The power output is generally considered to have been about 265 bhp. The hand crafted interior was of a comparable quality to that of the standard bodied vehicles and the performance was pretty much the same, although the body stiffening needed to compensate for the destruction of the inherent strength of the mono construction of the 4 door car, did require a bit of additional weight being added to the vehicle where it could not be seen. So a standard body vehicle perhaps had a bit better performance than the up market version of the car. Rolls-Royce remedied that problem when it released the Corniche version in 1971.

Our car was produced in 1966 with solid Regal red paintwork which is a beautiful colour for a car of this shape and size. Combined with the black leather upholstery and walnut veneer woodwork this car has a very classy feel to it. When we bought it, it had Dayton chrome wire wheels fitted. I am told that this option was fitted to Col Joy’s new Silver Shadow when he bought one during that period.

We have enjoyed having this car. It is a delightful road car and even if we have additional passengers there is plenty of space in the rear seats once the passengers are in the car. We have had only minimal problems with the car. A replacement water pump was probably the biggest single item. We have had the rear suspension attended to because the springs were a bit soft.

We did experience a starting problem while on one club run. The jump start required was helpful when we first experienced the problem at Echuca while on a club run but not something we could live with for the rest of the run over a week or so. With both gas and petrol tanks full we decided to drive home, slowly, to conserve fuel. Stopping at a station for fuel meant shutting the engine down and a callout for the NRMA to get started again. We made it home with fuel to spare. The worst part of the experience came when after returning home, we were advised to push in the breaker button in the fuse box under the dash board and the problem was instantly resolved.

At static displays we often try to take both this one and the Corniche drophead to let people see the two variants of the 2 door car side by side. It is also interesting for people to see that, despite the passage of more than 7 years between their manufacture dates, the cars are basically the same body. This sameness continued in the Corniche for another 20 years or so.

In terms of rarity, special body Bentleys are right up there near the top. Just how many there are in Australia is not clear but there is one at McFeeters Museum at Forbes and another was offered for sale in 2011 at a figure of around $30,000. It is a little surprising to realize that, if there were to be sufficient Bentley T Coupes on the market at any one time, it would be possible to buy several of them for less than the price of a comparable condition Holden Monaro, Valiant Charger or Falcon GTHO. Rare cars such as the Bentley T coupe are in a quite affordable category.

Return to Home Page