Minneapolis Street Sighting: Bentley S2

I have a passion for British cars, classic and contemporary; moreso, the classic, and of those, I tend to favor the small, lithe, roadsters and of course open-wheeled sports cars and track cars. But I will not hesitate to turn down a proper British luxury motorcar no matter the stature--as long as I wasn't going to be held responsible for ownership costs.

As far as the twin British marques go, I tend to favor Bentley as opposed to Rolls Royce, even when the two marques looked damn near identical. Plus, saying the word "Bentley" just sounds cool. It's a shame that the brand name has been diluted in recent years and applied to boring, staid-looking vehicles that could easily pass for either bodykitted Chrysler 300s, generic luxury cars from an overseas insurance commercial.

Bentley didn't start out building boring-looking cars (or maybe they did depending on your sector of automotive interest), and I think the past is a great indication of that. While the current crop of Bentley motorcars is far more common (by common, I mean the number of cars produced is more than four digits long), the classic vehicles produced by Bentley were far less so. Case in point; the S2.

After looking at wikipedia and various Bentley fan sites, I can say that the S2 is by far the rarest as a long wheelbase with six made altogether; the more standard version (which I would assume this one is) had a production run of just over 1860 cars; not mega-rare, but not exactly common either, making this one a rather special spotting.

 What struck me first about this clean classic British sedan is the fact that the steering wheel is on the proper side. The license plates were proper, too, suggesting that this example had been recently imported. And it looked to be in wonderful shape, right down to the non-scuffed white-walls.

Paint was gleamy but no overly shiny, and I think the two-tone played a big favor in my decision to shoot the car (aside from the obvious traits of left-alone-Britness; I am a sucker for two-tone cars when done right, and I have never seen an old Bentley in two-tone, so this was a pretty good spot for me.

I enjoyed shooting this, and I have never seen it since, so I'm glad I shot it; I would love to find more classic Bentleys, but living in the rustbelt, I doubt that will happen anytime soon (at least till summer rolls around again.)