Forrest Lycett and his amazing 8-litre Bentley (Page 6 of 9)
Motor Sport Magazine, July 1998
Forrest had asked 'Mac' to find him a car for the Edwardian section of the VSCC and an Alfonso Hispano-Suiza was duly discovered. But when it shed a wheel at Littlestone speed-trials, the car's new owner was so disgusted when lots of rusty razor blades fell from the hub, obviously to cope with worn splines (not 'Mac's' doing, I am sure) that he gave the car to me and, a further aspect of his generosity, wanted to reimburse me for collecting it. As some compensation, he had won his class with his 4½-litre Bentley. He had already presented the VSCC with the Lycett Trophy for best aggregate performance during a season, which remained one of its most prestigious awards, ironically being first won in 1935 by Donald Monm's 4½-litre Invicta.
Other good performances included further class wins at Shelsley Walsh where the 8-litre beat E R Hall's TT Derby Bentley in the rain in 1936 and got its time clown to 46.42sec by 1937. It was quicker up the famous hill than Fane's 328 FN-BMW by 1.66sec in 1938 and beat it again on time in 1939. At Brighton it beat a Railton Terraplane in the 1934 half-mile speed-trials by three seconds and won its class there in '35, accelerating faster than Gardner's supercharged Mercedes-Benz, and sic Bugatti, Frazer Nash and MGs. In 1936 Lycett took his 4i.c to Brighton, and was first and third in the appropriate classes and he repeated this in 1937, with two class-firsts, and a third with the1913 Hispano. The 8-litre Bentley held the sportscar record for the Brighton course, and in 1936 it had been only 0.4sec slower than Fane’s supercharged Frazer Nash at Southsea and had won its class at Poole. Finally, before Hitler stopped play, the 4½ Bentley took another Brighton class win, and the Hispano was second in its class.
The 8-litre Bentley continued to chalk up many successes in sprints and in 1937 at Brooklands had broken the International and British Class-B records for the s s kilometre at 81.5mph , bettering by 3.58mph that of the racing single-seater 8-litre Panhard-Levassor. Yet it remained a perfectly practical road car, as I was to discover on a number of occasions.
Lycett would meticulously observe every speed-limit, even to braking hard before '30' signs, in spite of there then being no hidden cameras or radar traps. As a de-restriction sign came up he would transfer his foot from auxiliary accelerator to the loud one and the Bentley would go rapidly up to 90, 100, even to 110 mph, accelerating so fast that sometimes Forrest would be braking as he overtook groups of little saloons, aiming for a traffic gap ahead.
Continued on next page