Für diese Seite gilt dieCreative Commons License Attribution - NonCommercial - ShareAlike
(Namensnennung - Keine kommerzielle Nutzung - Weitergabe unter gleichen Bedingungen)
Quellen:
Britain’s Legendary Car Companies
The British motor industry has created many of the world’s outstanding car designs. Its famous brands – Jaguar, Bentley, Rolls-Royce and Aston Martin – are closely linked with some of the most recognised cars ever made.
British Racing Green (BRG). In 1928 the first recorded use of the darkest green colours was on the Bugatti of Briton William Grover-Williams, driving in the very first Monaco Grand Prix. In the 1920s British Bentley cars were successful at the Le Mans 24 hour races, all displaying a mid- to dark-green. This colour became known as British Racing Green and was regarded as a semi-official paintwork, especially in the 1950s and 1960s when British teams such as Vanwall, Cooper, Lotus, and BRM were successful in Formula One, all in different shades of dark green. The history of the famous greens was revived in 2000 by Jaguar Racing in Formula One, but after this team was sold to Red Bull by Ford in 2004, the new Red Bull Racing team used their own colours. In recent years Aston Martin has also returned to endurance racing, with their DBR9s painted in a light BRG. With the many successes of British racing teams through the years, British Racing Green became a popular paint choice for British sports and luxury cars, and a trendy choice for the original Mini Cooper, the new MINI.
The history of Rolls-Royce began when Rolls-Royce Limited started manufacturing cars in 1903. The present factory at Goodwood is the fifth Rolls-Royce UK based automobile production facility since 1904. The previous four were located in Manchester, London, Derby, and Crewe. The characteristic RR badge on the front of the grill changed from red to black in 1934 upon the death of Henry Royce in 1933. The famous ornament in front of the bonnet (hood U.S.) is familiarly known as Emily. In 1998, the owner Vickers decided to sell Rolls-Royce Motors. The most likely buyer was BMW, who already supplied engines and other components for Rolls-Royce and Bentley cars, but BMW's final offer of £340m was beaten by Volkswagen's £430m. From 1998 to 2002 BMW would continue to supply engines for the cars and would allow use of the names by VW, but this would end on 1 January 2003. From that date, only BMW would be able to name cars "Rolls-Royce", and VW's former Rolls-Royce/Bentley division would only build cars called "Bentley."
Bentley Motors Limited is a British manufacturer of automobiles founded on 18 January 1919 by Walter Owen Bentley known as W.O. Bentley had been previously known for his range of rotary aero-engines in World War I. After the war W. O. Bentley designed and made cars that won the Le Mans 24 hour race in 1924. Following models repeated those successes in June of 1927, 1928, 1929 and 1930. Purchased by Rolls-Royce in 1931, when production was moved from London to Derby and later to Crewe, this company has been owned by the Volkswagen Group of Germany since 1998. The business is still based in Crewe, Cheshire, England with their Central Production Facilities there. A new version of the Bentley Continental was introduced at the 2009 Geneva Auto Show: The Continental Supersports. This new Bentley is a supercar combining extreme power with environmentally friendly technology. A muscular two-seater with distinctive exterior and interior styling, the Supersports is Bentley in design, craftsmanship and performance. The engine derived from Bentley’s current W12 power unit was reengineered, to achieve phenomenal supercar potency: 0–100 km/h in 3.9 seconds and with 630 PS. The Continental Supersports is the fastest and most powerful Bentley ever.
Aston Martin Lagondais a British manufacturer of luxury sports cars, based in Gaydon, Warwickshire. The company’s name is derived from one of the company's founders, Lionel Martin, and from the Aston Hill speed hill-climb near Aston Clinton in Buckinghamshire. The company also designs and engineers cars which are manufactured by Magna Steyr in Austria. In most of the Ian Fleming James Bond movies, the protagonist used an Aston Martin and so the trademark gained worldwide popularity.
Jaguar Cars Ltd, known simply as Jaguar is also a British luxury car manufacturer, headquartered in Whitley, Coventry, England. Jaguar was founded as the Swallow Sidecar Company by Sir William Lyons in 1922, originally making motorcycle sidecars before changing to passenger cars. The name was changed to Jaguar after WWII to avoid the negative associations of the SS initials. Following a unification with the British Motor Corporation in 1968, subsequently integrated into Leyland, which itself was later nationalized as British Leyland, Jaguar was listed on the London Stock Exchange in 1984, and became a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index until it was acquired by Ford in 1989. One of the most legendary Jaguar cars was the X-Type, a legend from the sixties up to the present day. Jaguar cars are today designed in Jaguar Land Rover's engineering centres at the Whitley plant in Coventry and at their Gaydon site in Warwickshire, and are manufactured in Jaguar's Castle Bromwich assembly plant near Birmingham. The company is now part of the Jaguar Land Rover business, a subsidiary of the Indian company Tata Motors.