In fact, they’ve struggled but kept at it, which again is a defining quality. This is the number zero “engineering car” (there’s another of these, in addition to the 12 recreations that have been sold) and it was so absolutely dreadful at first, they had to learn quickly to iron out the kinks. They recently did six hours at race speeds at the Goodwood motor circuit to try to bed things in and, with 6,000 miles on the clock, it’s feeling as though its parts are getting on a bit better with their neighbours.
So, click the electrics and ignition on, clunk both magneto switches down, fuel pump on and press the big black wooden starter button, and with a gentle whirr it starts and a puff of hydrocarbons blows forwards from behind the tonneau. Down with the heavy clutch, slide the blade-type gear lever into first and step on the accelerator pedal. The throttle isn’t the last word in progression, and if you’ve got feet the size of mine, you have to blip the throttle with the side of your foot; but unlike the authentic team car, which has moderate boost in respect of its age, this one has the full-fat 245bhp at 3,200rpm, so it fair leaps away: with the exhaust bellowing and the supercharger whining, first impressions are of a runaway train – and that’s with nothing coming the other way.
You clack through to second, then third and heave at the Bluemels steering wheel, using the throttle to balance the chassis to plant or take the weight off the 21in front wheels as you corner.
It’s cold and icy, so the Blockley tyres aren’t particularly grippy, and there’s a lot of fuel in the back, so it’s very tail-happy. The car doesn’t seem to mind, though, and feels more of a piece than most of the other Blowers I’ve driven; less like 20,000 components flying in rough formation.
And, boy, does it want to go. Not in a modern way, but in a more leisurely, unstoppable-force manner. Ian Fleming gave a Blower Bentley to his literary super-spy James Bond, and as I roar around the circuit where 007’s Aston Martin was rolled a squillion times by the second-unit team in Casino Royale, the Blower is moving nervously around underneath me, requiring steering corrections and careful throttle control.
It’s all lovely and controllable – until it isn’t, so you need to have a care. Getting to grips with one of these during an endurance race, with the weight of expectation on your shoulders, must have been terrifying.
The light is fading now and the photos look like a period Le Mans at dusk, with more than two-thirds of the race still to run, recalling Birkin’s skill and courage in the real car.
While it’s undoubtedly Bentley’s legacy to plunder or squander, depending on your view, there’s a lot that isn’t known about these cars. As Dr Clare Hay, author and doyenne of Bentley historians, points out: “The precise details of the arrangement between Birkin and Bentley are complicated and messy.”
There were certainly five cars out of Welwyn, a proper race team, which was bankrolled by Dorothy Paget, the Whitney family-fortune heiress and keen racehorse owner and gambler. She’s the uncelebrated “Bentley Boy”: “Poor Dorothy, she was slighted at every telling of this story,” says Hay.
The Bentley factory, then located in Cricklewood, north London, subsequently built 50 roadgoing cars as required by the regulations. These were more house-trained, with less boost than the racers, some with longer wheelbases. Yet company founder Walter Owen (WO) Bentley didn’t agree with supercharging, saying it would “pervert the engine’s design and corrupt the performance… it was a false inducer”.
The background, however, is that sales of the naturally aspirated 4½-litre were falling at this point and WO wanted to sell his new and more refined 6½-litre model. Birkin was a forceful personality, though; Woolf Barnato, Bentley’s owner at the time, liked the idea and then (as now) Bentley needed the money. There’s plenty of evidence, in fact, that the Birkin/Paget team were part of the factory Le Mans effort, which was eventually won by Bentley’s official entry of 6½-litre models.
