🔒My Sweet Ride: A Rare Marque of Distinction

Chris Nicotra estimates there are only a dozen Mark VI Bentleys still in existence from 1946. That was the first year the Bentley factory in Crewe, England resumed manufacturing automobiles for the civilian market following six years focused solely on the manufacture of aircraft engines during World War II.

One of that dozen — a Mark VI four-door standard steel sports saloon — now belongs to him.

Nicotra, 46, principal of Apollo Investment & Real Estate Holdings and co-principal (with his father Dennis) of property-management company Olympia Properties, both in New Haven, discovered the rare jewel just this summer.

The discovery was fortuitous, in a way, as 2019 marks the centennial of Bentley Motors Ltd., founded in 1919 by W.O. Bentley in Cricklewood, North London. In 1931, with the world economy plunged into depression, Bentley was acquired by Rolls-Royce. Between the two of them, they have represented the most prestigious motor-car marque on the planet ever since.

Nicotra’s Mark VI was originally ordered by and delivered direct from the Crewe factory to British department-store magnate John Musker, whose Home & Colonial Stores Ltd. was one of the UK’s largest retail chains. After Musker passed away, the vehicle was acquired in the mid-1970s by a retired World War II general (corporals and sergeants mostly don’t drive Bentleys) who brought it to the United States.

That gentleman passed away in 1999, and the Bentley had been sitting in a Maryland garage ever since. Nicotra bought it this summer from the gentleman’s 89-year-old widow — sight unseen. Nicotra had the vehicle shipped from Maryland to Black Horse Garage in Bridgeport, which went through the car “from A to Z,” Nicotra explains. After all, the Bentley hadn’t even been started since the Clinton administration.

“I had to have it,” Nicotra explains, simply. “Number one, I love cars that are all original. Everything about this vehicle was all original — from the paint, to the engine, to the drive train, to the interior. It was like a piece of history preserved.” All that, and it had just 66,000 miles on the odometer — less than 10,000 miles per decade since it left the factory.

He paid about $75,000 for the vehicle, becoming only the third owner of a piece of history preserved, and a work of automotive artistry.

But unlike most works of art, it moves. The right-hand-drive beauty is powered by a 4.25-liter F-head straight-6 engine with a 4-speed gearbox that shifts on the floor.

The first time Nicotra finally got behind the wheel, “I could not wipe the smile off my face,” he recalls. “I literally felt like I was stepping back in time. And the car just turns heads — it is just such an incredible piece of history.”

Nicotra’s Mark VI was just the 91st car to leave the Crewe factory after postwar production resumed — and since production was curtailed way back in 1939 on the eve of the German invasion of Poland that ignited World War II.

While some might be tempted to seal such a rare jewel in a hermetically sealed chamber, Nicotra actually drives his Mark VI — to the store, to his son’s school, wherever. “Cars are meant to be driven,” he says simply. He also allows that, “When I pull up to school — or anywhere, for that matter — jaws drop.

“I’m not going to put 10,000 miles on it,” he says. “But it’s a car — it wants to be driven. And it pleases so many people, and turns so many heads. So it’s worth it.”

During World War II the Bentley factory in Crewe manufactured Rolls Royce Merlin engines for Spitfire fighters and other British warplanes to defeat the German Luftwaffe. It is a historical irony that since 1998 Bentley Motors Ltd. has been a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Volkswagen Group of Wolfsburg, Germany.

Weird how life works sometimes.