Bentley has built the first “Blower Bentley” continuation car. The inter-war icon has been faithfully recreated using the British brand’s own 1929 4½-litre “Team Blower” racer as a starting point and 12 more examples of the classic racer will follow.
The first Blower Bentley continuation car, which the British firm has dubbed “Car Zero,” took 40,000 hours of work to complete. It’s made from 2,000 hand-crafted components, each of which were templated using the car’s original drawings, tooling and a laser-scanned 3D model of Sir Henry “Tim” Birkin’s famed racer.
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Like the original Blower Bentley, automobile Zero is powered by a supercharged 4½-litre four-cylinder petrol engine. It’s an exact recreation of the engines that powered Tim Birkin’s race automobiles in the late 1920s, featuring the same aluminium pistons, overhead camshaft, twin-spark ignition and a newly machined Amherst Villiers roots-type supercharger.
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However, while Bentley’s engineers were building the first engine, they were met with a problem – how to run it in. The unit didn’t marry up to any of the brand’s current engine dynos so, to get around the issue, they repurposed an engine testbed that was originally designed to power-test Merlin V12 aero engines for WWII-era Spitfire and Hurricane fighters.