in late April before Car Zero hit the Circuit de la Sarthe along with some customer-owned 1929 2022 Blowers at the Le Mans Classic in late June. It started with an on-track debut at the Donington Historic Festival in the U.K. The 12-car production run is about two-thirds through, now, and Car Zero has seen thousands of kilometres of real-world testing, but 2023 marks the first year it or any of these continuation Blowers has been properly driven in anger. “Although we have also got some completely new customers who’ve never owned a classic before.” “Some of the customers got the original car, so the idea was that they’d buy this, and then they could put the mileage on this one, and keep the original in the garage and look after it,” Law explains. And just like the 1929 cars’, all these parts are meant to be used and abused.

Save for a handful of invisible tweaks in the interest of absolute safety, they are of the exact same design, specifications, and materials as a 1929 Bentley Blower’s, and constructed using the same techniques. The hot-riveted chassis, magnesium-crankcase engines, and the balance of the suspension and steering bits were similarly sourced from suppliers or recreated in-house at Mulliner. Article content Tony Law, right, with Bentley’s ‘Car Zero’ Blower continuation car ahead of a run up the hill at the 2023 Goodwood Festival of Speed Photo by Nicholas Maronese This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.

“While it never won an endurance race, the Blower Bentley was the outright fastest race car of the day.” “No other pre-war Bentley had an impact like the supercharged 4½-litre ‘Blower’ Bentley,” says the company of those originals, three of which saw competition in the 1930 Le Mans 24 Hours.

For yours truly, watching the big, black brute’s hurried pass from the grandstands and, now, poring over it in the paddock, it was hard to believe this Bentley rocks a build date from this decade.īut there is almost nothing on it to give it away as anything other than one of the four “Team Blowers” commissioned by racing driver Sir Tim Birkin in 1929. “I’ve not got a time yet, but apparently it ran really well,” he beams. We caught up with Antony Law, a lead technician with Mulliner’s special-build projects team, a few minutes after he’d shuttled the company’s own “Car Zero” Blower continuation prototype back from its run up the hill at Goodwood.

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