Andrew Frankel pits Bentley 8 Litre against Bugatti Royale to find out who built the greatest ever luxury car.
The first time your eyes focus on a Bugatti Royale in the metal, their lids will blink. And blink again. Your brain will request further information before drawing any conclusions. So you look again and this time it’s clear that this is no trompe d’oeil, no trick of the light. Can someone really have decided to build a car that big for private sale and for use on the public roads? It seems, after all, that they did.
That someone was Ettore Bugatti. Eighty-one years ago, Bugatti decided to build a car that in size, stature and sheer beauty would eclipse anything else ever offered to the public. Except it wasn’t exactly the seething multitudes that he had in mind. An expression of interest from Spain’s King Alfonso gave him the perfect name not just to sum up the majesty of the proposed car, but also the job description of its intended purchasers. Technically it was called the Type 41, but to the outside world it would be known by one name alone: Royale. It was unrivalled.
Or was it? As the years rolled by and the Royale failed to sell to anyone, let alone those with blue blood, another engineer – whose cars Bugatti had referred to not entirely kindly as “the fastest lorries in the world” – was working on a luxury car of his own. His name was Walter Owen Bentley and by 1930 he needed a successor to the ageing 6½ Litre. Like Bugatti, Bentley had an impeccable racing heritage and ‘WO’ reckoned that, so long as the engineering was pure and correctly conceived, there was no reason why you couldn’t construct anything from a limo to a Le Mans winner on the same chassis – and history would prove him emphatically right.
However his masterpiece never raced, not in period at least, and was swallowed up along with the company as recession bit hard in 1931. But not before 100 8 Litres had been built. Its lack of suitability to the times in which it was born is often cited as a contributing factor to the firm’s downfall, but compared to the Royale – of which just six were made – it was a runaway success. Besides, the view of WO, albeit not the most astute of businessmen, was that the 8 Litre could have carried Bentley through the recession had it not had to sell alongside the underpowered 4 Litre, with its non-indigenous Ricardo engine.
Even at a basic mechanical level, there are interesting comparisons to be drawn between Bentley and Bugatti’s most ambitious creations. Both engines had fixed heads, single overhead cams and multi-valve layouts, with both staying faithful to their respective trademark three- and four-valve configurations. Both came with twin ignition systems too, by magneto and coil. Even their internal dimensions (the Bentley’s pistons swept a 110x140mm bore, Bugatti’s 125x130mm) were similar, the 12,763cc Royale’s extra capacity over the 7983cc 8 Litre coming mainly from the presence of eight rather than six cylinders. And, with 220bhp from its eight litres compared to the Royale’s 300bhp from 12.7, it was the British car that boasted the higher specific output.
While the Royale is clearly bigger, it is not by so much as you might expect. The 8 Litre sits on a 13ft chassis, the Royale’s measures 14ft 1in. Nor is the Bentley’s 4ft 8in track dwarfed by the Bugatti’s 5ft 3in. Clearly the Bentley was less grandiose but its combination of size, mechanical purity and racing heritage makes it the closest thing to a rival the Royale had in its short life.
And of all the 8 Litres and Royales, you’d struggle to find two more closely matched in concept than these. Before we go further, there is something about this ‘Royale’ you need to know. It is, in fact, a replica of the Coupé Napoleon and not the real thing. It belongs to Tom Wheatcroft who, upon deciding he wanted one and finding supply limited to a round number, had one built. It took 10 years to make, guided by the original drawings, and was completed in 1999 for a cost then of around £1.6m. Technically it’s not a Royale at all, but so accurate is it in every detail, it deserves to be thought of as the seventh car. The body alone took 11,300 hours to assemble and then cost £70,000 just to paint.