If you attended the Cholmondeley Power and Speed event last weekend then chances are you’ll have come across several vintage racing cars, including the Packard-Bentley.
A car like this is worth a closer look and not just because it’s a one-off creation. It is quite frankly one of the most brilliantly insane vehicles ever to be created and it’s hard to decide which fact you could highlight about it is the most ludicrous.
The engine
The Packard-Bentley, also known as “Mavis” is what you get when you cram a 42-litre engine (no you didn’t misread 4.2-litre, it actually is that big) into a 1930 Bentley 8-litre chassis. The engine is mated with a four-speed Bentley C-type gearbox with a conventional H pattern change.
The car had to be modified to accommodate the new engine and as a result became 21-foot long and weighs 2.4 tons.
While the twin-port design engine only has 12 cylinders, it also comes with many as 24 exhaust pipes sticking out of it, and they’re capable of spitting out a lot of smoke and some big, impressive flames that put a barbeque to shame.
The supercharged Packard engine in this beast came from an American World War II-era marine military Patrol Torpedo (PT) boat. It reportedly produces a whopping 1,500bhp and around 2,700Nm of torque at 2,400rpm. Those sort of figures crush even Bugatti’s new hypercar, the 1,479bhp Chiron.
Also incredibly thirsty, the Packard-Bentley uses four gallons of fuel per minute when it’s at full acceleration. To allow the car to actually get anywhere then, the car is equipped with three fuel tanks, including a main 52-gallon tank and two smaller scavenge tanks.
The interior
Driving the car is a unique experience for drivers, and not only because of the humungous engine at the front.
The steering column is offset and angled in order to accommodate the car’s huge engine block, and around the string-bound steering wheel is an array of switches and dials which wouldn’t look out of place on a World War II fighter plane. That’s no coincidence, because the dashboard is primarily ‘aircraft specification’.
There’s even a trigger button from a Spitfire found under the steering wheel, but this car isn’t quite ridiculous enough to have actual guns. Although there are what appears to be torpedoes strapped to each side of the car, they are only designed to look like weapons and are in reality just oil tanks.
The creator
So who’s behind this charmingly crazy motor vehicle? Well the answer is Chris Williams, a member of the Oxfordshire-based Vintage Sports Car Club.
Although Williams put together the Packard-Bentley as recently as 2010, the specially fabricated parts used to make it are from many decades ago.
Williams has previously said that his Packard-Bentley has been described as the “biggest automotive waste of time, money and engineering expertise ever built”, although he adds such criticism was light-hearted.
And really, a light-hearted attitude is the best one to take when observing a car like this. It serves no practical purpose but in a way it deserves praise for its sheer audacity to even exist.
It certainly appears to be a crowd-pleaser too. The Packard-Bentley first appeared in Cholmondeley back in 2010 and has been a regular at the motoring event there since. We saw first-hand at this year’s event that a substantial number of attendees were keen to take a closer look, take a photo of it or have a little chat with the owner.
If you’re going to build a car that follows no rules, it’s at least fascinating to see how far the boundaries of motor engineering can be pushed by those who know how to build cars. It leaves us with cars that are amazing just to think about and indeed to look at even when they’re not even moving.
