"If there was one thing that
set James Bond really moving in life, with the exception
of gun-play, it was being passed at speed by a pretty girl;
and it was his experience that girls who drove competitively
like that were always pretty - and exciting."
James
Bond flirted with the idea of becoming a racing driver in
his early career and the first of his cars was one of the
last 4½ litre Bentleys with a supercharger by Amherst Villiers.
The car is one of the famous "blower" Bentleys,
of which just 54 were ever produced. Developed
by Sir Henry
Birkin with the specific aim of winning Le
Man, the addition of the huge
crankshaft driven supercharger in front of the radiator
enabled the car to produce 242 bhp compared to 130 bhp without.
Although
badly damaged in Casino
Royale, James Bond's car was repaired in time to
make an appearance in Moonraker.
However, after it was written off
by the release of fourteen tons of newsprint from the back
of a lorry James Bond appears without a car until an Aston
Martin DB III is made available in Goldfinger
from the service's car pool. It should probably have been
more correctly described as an Aston Martin DB Mark III,
one of the DB 2/4 Mark IIIs with a new front grill based
on the DB3S racing car. This had a number of extras, although
not as many as the DB5 in the film and its ejector seat.
Bond
obviously had a thing for Bentleys though, and purchased
a 1954 Mark II Continental Bentley with the R type
chassis, big six engine and 13:40 back axel ratio. Described
as "the most selfish car in England", Bond had bought the
wreck of a Continental after its previous owner, "some rich
idiot", had written it off against a telegraph pole. "She
went like a bird and a bomb and Bond loved her more than
all the women at present in his life". Not happy with
the car as it was, he had a body commissioned to turn it
into a 2 seater, had a silver bolt in place of the Bentley
symbol on the bonnet and later, against the advice of Rolls-Royce,
had fitted an Arnott supercharger controlled by a magnetic
clutch.
They said that the
crankshaft bearings wouldn't take the extra strain and withdrew
their guarantees, but when Bond gets a chance to try his
new toy on the way to Royale-Les-Eaux at the beginning of
On
Her Majesty's Secret Service, he flips up the red
switch on the dash to activate the supercharger and takes
the car up to 125 mph.
