George Ratcliffe’s first proper drive in his newly purchased Bentley was across Mongolia
MAN & MACHINE
OH MY WORD! Central accelerator pedal, crash gearbox – learning to drive a vintage Bentley, my first ‘proper’ old car, was certainly a challenge. I’d had a lesson with an expert after buying the Bentley but it and its two sister cars were due to be shipped out to Mongolia quite soon, so we probably put in only about 100km practising on local roads in the UK.
The reason for the trip was that my father, Jim Ratcliffe [founder and CEO of the INEOS Group, which makes the Grenadier 4x4], was coming up to his 70th birthday and we wanted to celebrate it in style. We’d already done a couple of marathon motorbike journeys: for his 60th, about 15 friends and family rode across Africa, doing as much off-road as possible – some 17,000km in 100 days – and about four years ago we rode from the top of Argentina to the bottom of Chile. To do that first trip, I also had to learn to ride a motorcycle.
The idea for tackling Mongolia in vintage Bentleys came from RAC chairman Ben Cussons. He suggested that driving a section of the Peking-Paris route in Bentleys would be the perfect adventure. We sourced three 4.5 Litre cars from William Medcalf, whose team rally-prepped them for us; when we got to Mongolia we’d be on our own. As support vehicles, we had four new Grenadiers – including a prototype of the Quartermaster crew-cab pickup, to carry spare wheels and luggage – plus the world’s oldest production Series I Land Rover, JUE 477, which my dad had bought as a wreck before commissioning its sensitive restoration. Another Series I and a rally-spec Tuthill Porsche 911 completed the line-up.
By the time we arrived in Mongolia, it was about six weeks since I’d last driven the Bentley, so I had to learn to drive it all over again. The usual route through Mongolia is in the north, where there are more roads and trails, but we elected to travel through the south, where it’s all sandy desert, nomadic peoples and barely more than the odd path. That meant setting a slow pace, as little as 20km/h average speed, to pres
