What Do the Bentley Wings Mean?

Walter Owen Bentley founded Bentley Motors in January 1919. Bentley's own history says he turned to his friend, the artist F. Gordon Crosby, for the badge, and the motor1 history of the logo states it was created in 1919 by Crosby. Crosby was an artist devoted to racing who also designed an Icarus bonnet mascot for the marque, according to the same Bentley material.

The B is the easy part. It is the first letter of the founder's surname, the only lettering on the badge, set in white on a black oval. The wings are where the questions start.

The sources consulted for this page do not record Crosby's reasoning, and Bentley has not issued a statement about what the wings stand for. The common reading is speed, and one outlet links it to W. O. Bentley's earlier work designing aero engines for fighter aircraft in the First World War. That fits the era, but it is an inference, not a quote from the founder or the artist.

Wings were also a familiar motif on radiator mascots and badges in the 1920s, so the idea needed no unusual explanation at the time. For the 2025 redraw Bentley said the new wing angle was inspired by the wings of a peregrine falcon. That is a statement about the 2025 drawing, not about Crosby's original intent.

A detail that fans love is that the two wings do not have the same number of feathers. Reports on the 2025 redesign say the update returned to the asymmetric feather count of the 1919 original, with ten feathers on one side and eleven on the other, and that later versions had lined the sides up more evenly.

The reason is less certain. One German motor1 article says Crosby chose uneven feathers to make counterfeiting harder. No English-language or Bentley source found for this page repeats that explanation, so it should be treated as an unconfirmed story.

The layout has stayed since 1919 and only the drawing has changed. The 1931 archive version has bold outlined wings, the year Rolls-Royce bought Bentley. By 1991 it looks like polished chrome with shaded wings, and in 2002, as the Continental GT arrived under Volkswagen, the feathers became glossy and detailed. In 2025 Bentley introduced a sharper, flatter emblem designed under Robin Page, removing the fan of feathers under the B.

One more detail often asked about is color. Bentley has used different colors for the B on the badge, and a 1998 Motor Sport article described green as thoroughbred, blue as glorious, black as daring and red as passion. That reading comes from the press, not a consistent company rule, so it is not a decoder for the logo itself.