Tony Hunter had always wanted a Bond car – so he designed and built his own, based on the descriptions in Ian Fleming’s books
Words Mark Dixon Photography Bentley Motors Ltd
‘ Bond had the most selfish car in England… She went like a bird and a bomb and Bond loved her more than all the women at present in his life rolled, if that were feasible, together.’
Undoubtedly a petrolhead, then: that’s how Ian Fleming introduces the car owned by his fictional creation James Bond in the 1961 novel, Thunderball; not a Silver Birch Aston Martin DB5 – which was a conceit of the movie makers – but a one-off Bentley Continental roadster. The Continental wasn’t Bond’s first Bentley by any means, but it’s the one that appears most often in the books and it is the car now owned by Bond enthusiast Tony Hunter.
Of course, since Bond’s Bentley was entirely fictional, the only way Tony could own it was to build it. Fortunately, he has been a professional car designer all his working life, beginning at Rover in 1990 and going on to work for a host of big-name marques – he conceived the interior of BMW’s ‘new’ Mini – before ending up as head of interior design-production for Tata and his current freelance role as a design consultant. He’s been a Bond fan for even longer.
‘I was really into the books when I was a kid, and there was something in the relationship that Bond had with his car that made me want to feel the same way about the car in my life,’ he explains. ‘At first I thought that I’d just get a Bentley, and that would make me feel like James Bond. So I tried R-Types, and S1s and even T-series cars, but none of them were exactly what I’d imagined. Really, it needed to be a convertible and have a manual gearbox, and it should feel special. So then I thought, well, I’m a car designer: how difficult can it be?’
Tony’s reasoning was that, since Bond’s Bentley was supposedly a modified Continental, which was basically a coachbuilt body on an R-Type chassis, he should be able to create something similar. So, as his donor car, he bought a 1954 James Young-bodied R-Type from a company called Bensport, which was producing its own interpretation of a two-door Bentley coupé, dubbed La Sarthe. The ’54 R-Type turned out not to be as good as he’d hoped but it did lead to him collaborating with Bensport on a design for the La Sarthe, which was road-tested in Octane 142.
‘I was going to Poland every month to oversee the work by the coachbuilders there,’ he explains, ‘and, while the result wasn’t quite as I’d envisaged, it did help me work out what
