Bentley Builds a Brand-New 1929 Blower Bentley - Wait, What?
The exacting replica only took 40,000 hours of work, hand assembly, and laser scans of a 1929 4 1/2-Litre racer to come to life.
Which of the two Bentley 4 1/2-Liter Blower models above is an original from 1929—and which one is the in-house re-creation that just rolled out of Bentley's facilities in Crewe? Take a minute, it might seem confusing at first. Give up? Well, both are legitimate, factory Bentley Blowers. The one in the foreground, however, with the big "0" painted on its grille, is the first of 13 Continuation Series models painstakingly recreated in the original supercharged Bentley's likeness. Per Bentley, that makes the car—dubbed "Car Zero"—the first brand-new so-called Blower Bentley to roll out of its factory since 1930.
Car Zero is thus the prototype for Bentley's Mulliner operation. Twelve more are coming, but this is the development mule that will be battle-tested before those customer cars are completed. Before you even ask, sorry—those customer cars have all been spoken for, so you're as tethered to the used Blower Bentley market now as you were before Mulliner undertook the task of resurrecting this 90-year-old model for people richer than, well, almost everyone.
Mulliner had to create several tools and jigs to handle the construction and testing of the Car Zero, including a test cradle for evaluating the 4 1/2-litre engine, a "100-year-old design," as Bentley puts it. The cradle mimics the front section of the Blower Bentley's chassis, and allows the old engine to mesh with Bentley's computerized dynamometer. Special software and coding was required to make that system even understand what it was dyno'ing, and Bentley humble-brags that some parts that were used originally saw duty evaluating Merlin V-12 aircraft engines (a task which Bentley handled going back to 1938). The engine itself is an exact replica of the supercharged mill in Tim Birkin's Team Blowers (one of which was the example scanned to create Car Zero), and Bentley amusingly notes that it has many features that would have made a 1970s-era sports car blush, from aluminum pistons to an overhead camshaft to a magnesium crankcase.
SOURCE: MOTORTREND