Over its 100 years, Bentley has produced many cars that have become famous as icons of the company’s competition success, but none more so than Old Mother Gun.
A Bentley legend in a multitude of ways, the car has been a familiar sight at Goodwood for years and true to form it will be back on 5th July for this year’s Festival of Speed presented by Mastercard. But not blasting up the hill. This year it will be in the Bonhams marquee looking for a new owner…
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The most special old Bentley is for sale in Bentley’s most special centenary year and Goodwood has been chosen as the place for its new keeper to come forward. With Old Mother Gun – officially, the 1927 Bentley Jackson Special – having held us in awe so often, Goodwood is an appropriate place for the Bentley sale of the century.
A regular racer at both FOS and the Goodwood Revival, this most well-known of all Bentley specials was last with us in 2018 when the Duke of Richmond selected it as one of the 25 greatest cars to mark 25 years of the Festival of Speed. Its credentials for such an honour are unimpeachable.
It was the first 4.5-litre ever made. In only its second race, the 24-hour Grand Prix de Paris at the Circuit de la Sarthe, it won – by over 80 miles. As a works car with Captain Woolf Barnato (who coined its “Mother Gun” name) it was first at Le Mans in 1928. And then second a year later with Jack Dunfee.
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Its record at Brooklands was just as impressive, and memorably captured in 1935 when it was photographed storming around the bumpy banking with all four wheels off the ground. Old Mother Gun was at the last-ever race meeting in Brooklands in 1939 when it earned its driver the third of just 17 130mph badges ever awarded. Subsequently the car was clocked at almost 150mph.
Over its illustrious career it has had different chassis, different engines (4.5-litre, then 6.5-litre, now 8.0-litre) and different bodies, culminating as the central driving position single-seater Jackson Special we are now most familiar with, thanks to Stanley Mann Racing which restored it in 1989 and now campaigns it tirelessly.
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Old Mother Gun didn’t just win races, it set records as well with a variety of speed marks set in the 1990s. With all of this, and a great deal more besides, it is no surprise that Bonhams says the history file is one of most extensive it has ever seen.
What Bonhams is not saying is how much Old Mother Gun is expected to sell for. Whatever it is, it won’t be enough.
Photography courtesy of Bonhams and Drew Gibson.
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