Thank Frankel it’s Friday: Driving Old Mother Gun

I’m not sure why, but to me it’s none of the names above, but ST3001, the chassis number it had when first built in 1927. Even when I drove it 70 years later it’s probable that nothing significant of that car remained, it having been rebodied, re-chassised and re-engined over time, as was normal for cars that evolved into Specials once their front-line racing career was over.

The same is true of Old Number One, the Speed Six that became the first individual car to win Le Mans twice in 1929-30, but which changed out of all recognition thereafter. It took a court case to determine that the car remained entitled to the identity of Old Number One because it was continuously developed from the original. Like Old Mother Gun, this was no imposter. You might as well ask if you are still you despite the fact that from the neck down you contain none of the cells with which you were born.

Anyway, I loved ST3001 from a child even if its first significant act was to all but wipe out the entire Bentley team at Le Mans. The first 4.5-litre ever built and more correctly seen as a 3.0-litre with a 4.5-litre engine, it was driven at the 1927 race by Frank Clement (the only professional racing driver ever hired by Bentley) and one Leslie Callingham. The car was so quick that in Clement’s opening stint he lapped the entire field, including the two other factory 3.0-litre Bentleys. But then Callingham climbed aboard and, coming through White House corner found a Theophile Schneider spun across the road. He swerved clean off the road, tipping ST3001 onto its side in the ditch which was then collected by George Duller in one of the 3.0-litres and the SCH Davis in the other. Callingham had the rather ghoulish experience of, having gone to get help, returning to the car to find Duller and Davis searching the wreck for his body. Anyway, and as most will know, the Davis car struggled back to the pits, got lashed up and went on to record a famous victory.

The following year ST3001 won the race outright, but not before its chassis cracked in the final minutes of the race. The team knew what had happened because not only did Woolf Barnato drive past the pits with his thumbs down, they could see the bonnet overlapping the body. What they did not know was that the water pipes had fractured and it had already dropped all its coolant and Barnato was effectively driving an air-cooled Bentley. There can be few testaments to the engineering genius of W.O. Bentley that after almost 24 hours of racing the engine still survived without water for over 40 miles. The following year ST3001 enjoyed a rather less eventful run to second place, beaten only by Old Number One with an engine almost half as large again.

By the time I caught up with Mother Gun in 1997 it had had an incredible life, culminating in 1939 when it took the last 130mph lap badge on the last lap of the last meeting ever held at Brooklands. After the war its then owner Bill Short dismantled the car and never got around to putting it back together again. Vaughan Davis found it as a derelict wreck in 1967 for which he paid £145 and unable to afford to rebuild it, it would be 20 more years before it turned a wheel. But throughout that time, he had a dream that Mother Gun would lap a track at 130mph again. Even so it took the backing of Stanley Mann before the funds to restore the car became available.

It ran again in 1989 and soon started breaking records once more, not at Brooklands obviously, but the Millbrook bowl, which was the closest thing to the Brooklands outer circuit as existed at that time. In 1992 it broke a 1,000 miles record that had been held by John Cobb since before the war. But still it had not lapped at 130mph. But Mann worked on the car, tuning it, prising more power from its enormous six-cylinder motor until that day at Millbrook in 1997.

I was there and saw Vaughan climb aboard, settle down behind that massive wheel and head out onto the bowl. Quickly the speed climbed – 110mph, 120mph and onward. Vaughan kept his foot down despite the revs having long since headed into the red. It never missed a beat. And and when he felt the car could go no faster he completed a single lap before bringing it in. Aged 76, Vaughan Davis had lapped Mother Gun at 137mph, faster than it had ever gone in its life. His dream had become a reality and I was sad to read he died the following year.

When it was my turn to drive Mother Gun I didn’t average more than 100mph which, if I recall correctly, was plenty fast enough for me. You sit perched on the car with your legs splayed either side of the massive transmission tunnel. The wheel is huge, the rev-counter not much smaller. When I drove it, there was no speedometer so I only knew how fast I was going because the ‘hands off’ speed in top lane at Millbrook was designed to be 100mph. So I did a couple of laps being bounced about on the bumps before returning it safely to Vaughan.

I’m not sure what I’d do with Mother Gun if it were mine now. You couldn’t put it back to 1927 specification because to do so would require creating an entirely new car from scratch and the continuity would be broken. So I’d probably develop it some more, because that is in keeping with the history of the car. Besides, though Mother Gun has now lapped a circuit at 137mph, it’s still a way of the 143.44mph lap recorded by Cobb’s Napier-Railton. A Bentley fan to my boots and as someone who has revered Mother Gun since early childhood, it would be fantastic if, 70 years on, it finally became the fastest pre-war car to lap a UK circuit.