A one-of-a-kind motor car
Built for the road,
not the rope barrier.
Petronella is a bespoke vintage Bentley, designed for endurance rallies, tours and racing — with concours d'élégance styling and enough reliability to be your daily driver. This is something truly special.
Her foundation is a 1926 Bentley 3 Litre short chassis, stiffened with additional tubular cross members and reinforcement plates. The unique boat-tail body was 3D-modelled in-house, inspired by the long-bonnet Gurney Nutting Blower built for "Bentley Boy" Woolf Barnato — a lightweight laminated timber frame skinned in hand-formed aluminium on a traditional English Wheel.
Beneath the flat, Speed Six-like bonnet line sits a 3 Litre engine converted to 4½ Litre specification with an oversized 5.3 litre cylinder block: a forged, semi-counterbalanced crankshaft and forged rods designed by VBE, shell bearings in place of white metal, forged pistons, up-rated needle roller rockers and lightened valve gear. In effect, a straight-six 8 Litre with two cylinders lopped off.
Going against the grain of the purists, Petronella is aimed at the modern discerning driver. She carries the elegance and authority an original-character Bentley demands on the road, while discreet modern engineering — hydraulic brakes, coil ignition, alternator charging, a Laycock overdrive — makes her genuinely practical for modern-day driving: 70 mph at just 2,200 rpm.
“Challenging enough to be interesting, without being excessively hard work.”
— Octane magazine, on driving Petronella
