The 630-piece Blower Bentley puzzle | GRR
It’s the Blower Bentley as you have never seen it before: digitised. That most primordial of British racing icons has been committed to the virtual world as stage one in bringing 12 freshy minted re-creations of Bentley’s most famous model to life.
In what must rank as one of the more challenging remote-working assignments, a team of Bentley engineers has spent 1,200 man hours during lockdown measuring and laser-scanning all 630 components of a real Blower Bentley in order to recreate the car in CAD (Computer Aided Design) digital form.
The “master” Blower – Bentley’s own supercharged 4.5-litre team car built and raced by Sir Tim Birkin in 1929 – was taken apart piece by piece so each component could be duplicated for the 12 cars, each an exact mechanical copy of what is said to be the world’s most valuable Bentley. Not that the continuation series cars are cheap; no price has ever been made public but then they are all assigned to owners anyway.
The digital scan is the blueprint for 12 sets of parts to be made using original 1920s moulds and tooling jigs alongside the latest manufacturing technology. Parts to be newly made include the four-cylinder, 16-valve engine with cast iron cylinder liners and non-detachable cast-iron cylinder head. The supercharger will be an exact replica of the Amherst Villiers Mk IV roots-type supercharger, the secret of the 4,398cc engine’s 240bhp. The five Team Blowers made may never have won a Blue Riband race but they were the fastest cars of their day.
The continuation cars, with safety upgrades, will be hand crafted by Bentley bespoke division Mulliner to be a mirror image of the Birkin chassis number two car, owned by Bentley Motors since 2000. It is the first time Bentley has looked to its hero models from the past and made a continuation version, and the first time anyone has re-created a pre-war race car.
Now Bentley has committed its most famous model to the digital world it is possible to have a Blower Bentley car configurator, so the 12 owners can view their colour and trim choices on screen. Red with cream leather anyone?