James Wilson on the case of the vintage Bentley
A favourite talking point of sporting hacks is the so-called “golden age” of any particular sport. For cricketing writers it is usually a few decades before they were born. For boxing writers it is probably the era when there were fewer belts than boxers to compete for them. Rugby union, for its part, will always have a divide between fans of the amateur and professional eras respectively.
Gordon Bennett
As for motor racing, the favourite period among the cognoscenti seems to be the interwar years. That was when motor racing took on a serious, organised flavour rather than the rudimentary beginnings of the pre-Great War Gordon Bennett Cup, although the cars remained the product of men in sheds wielding spanners rather than robots in factories.
One wonders, incidentally, what modern health and safety mandarins might have made of driving in excess of 100mph in vehicles with no seat belts or roll cages, and with suspension that may as well have been derived from a skateboard. One of the celebrated marques of the age
