Behind the Design: Bentley’s JP Gregory

JP Gregory has worked at Bentley since 2009. Photo: Bentley Media

With Bentley announcing overnight that it will launch the facelift Bentayga SUV on June 30, we’re focusing on the man behind the design, and a cheeky comment I made to him about what he needed to ‘fix’ on the luxury off-roader.

Officially the name of Bentley’s head of design is Jean Paul Gregory, but he’s better known as JP Gregory, or JPG by the industry.

Born in northern England, his Catholic parents named him as Pope John Paul had visited Liverpool just before his birth in 1980.

He joined the Volkswagen Group after university and moved to Bentley in 2009 before being appointed Head of Exterior design in 2016.

He created the look of the Continental GT coupe and convertible, and is responsible for the facelift Bentayga.

I met JP at the Continental GT coupe launch in Singapore and sat next to him at dinner the night just hours after he’d flown in from the reveal of the “Conti” at Frankfurt motor show.  An affable person, we had chatted about his name, his family and life in general.

The next day, after the reveal of the Continental GT coupe and the inspiration behind the design, we sat down for an interview – with a minder from Bentley Singapore.

We started the interview laughing as JPG flung me his business card, so I jokingly reprimanded him and taught him the correct way to hand over a business card (card in two hands, present it to the other person). The minder was aghast at me telling him off.

Then the minder – if she could – would have kicked me under the table when I told JPG that he needed to fix the ugly huge grille of the Bentayga, and he whispered, “I will”. From the spy images of the facelift SUV, I think JPG has. Good work.

But back to the design of the Continental GT coupe.

JP Gregory is responsible for the facelift of the Bentayga, with the huge grille (above). Photo: Bentley

You said you used a fight jet as inspiration. What other muses did you have?

JPG: Being Bentley, we have absolutely fantastic characters to draw from, and it's something that we don't want to relive, but we want to definitely draw inspiration from. We have a really clear lineage when it comes to Grand Tourers.

We were inspired by a lot of different things, including the aviation and nautical industry. In the beginning, in the design studio, we peppered close-ups of all of these fantastic forms and sculptures on the wall just to inspire us and get our creative juices flowing.

But then at the same time as making a kind of modern statement, it was also important to make it unmistakably a Bentley. Unmistakably a Continental GT.

You're obviously a custodian of a legacy there, but with making it unmistakably a Bentley, is that sometimes the end of the design process? 

JPG: Every designer has a different challenge. Some designers have a blank canvas, but they don't have the heritage to draw from.

I don't consider it a hindrance; I consider it a privilege to be here, to be able to carry on the legacy of a car that people really care about.

The Continental is a beautiful car, and I think it would be wrong of me to have the ego to say, "I want to make my own statement".

I'm doing something that's the larger part of an important lineage, and so I don't find it a hindrance.

JP Gregory sketches the Continental Supersport. Photo: Bentley Media

You had to also include quite a bit of technology in this car, did that affect you with your external design? 

JPG: The modern car, including Continental, they now have to have a vast array of sensors and cameras, that even 10 years ago weren't there.

As a designer, how do you reconcile that? It is singly the biggest challenge in the design process.

Of course we talked about the early part of the design process with sketches and defining what you're inspired by, and creating the sculpture. Then when you're moving closer to production and you're integrating all of these sensors, you're integrating all the geometry.

One of the ways we constantly question ourselves is by keeping, almost we freeze in time, the kind of ideal sculpture. 

So, we reach a fairly late version in the design process, but not everything has been integrated, it's still very pure sculpture, very spontaneous statement. 

So, we keep that next to do the developing production model, so we constantly reference it. We constantly ask ourselves, "Have we lost any of the spirit?" And then if we have, through these various constraints and requirements that we have to work around, we ask ourselves what it is, why? How can we get it back?

I think it's very important to constantly question yourself, you know on a daily basis. Have we still got it? Have we still got that character that we set out to do in the beginning? And that's what being a good designer is. It's about translating something spontaneous to something that you can sell in all the markets.

The Bentley Continental GT at Parihoa, home of AutoMuse. Photo: Hamish Pattison