The Bentley Blower wasn't symmetrical

Last year, we learned Bentley was remaking the 4 ½ litre Blower. It was going to strip its most famous car to its core components before 3D scanning them ready to pump 12 recreations out at eye-shakingly high prices.

Well, that scanning process is almost complete, and it’s turned up some interesting discoveries.

“Recreating the Blower is contentious,” acknowledges Bentley CEO Adrian Hallmark. “We’re taking a car that wasn’t actually a Bentley – that’s become the most iconic and valuable Bentley – and we’re stripping it into 3,000 bits. Then we’re going to recreate it.

“The first thing we found is it’s not original! It was rebuilt in 1956 and a lot of the previous parts were taken off and binned. We have the original bill of materials handwritten in fountain pen, the original technical drawings in pencil and pen, and we’ve 3D scanned every component down to nominal dimensions. And we’ve found out the car’s not even symmetrical.

“They got the concept of symmetry in 1930 but weren’t accurate enough to build a chassis perfectly symmetrical. We’ll build the car back to exactly how it would have been in the Thirties, so we’re doing a conservation job on it, but we’ll make the recreation symmetrical. There’s no benefit to asymmetry in a chassis.”

The Blower recreation has sold out, as you’d expect. In fact the 12-strong production run was four times oversubscribed – “at Salon Privé three people almost trod on children to get to me to ask for one,” says Hallmark – but those missing out have been pouring other ideas into the Mulliner department ideas pot. Ideas like an electric-powered R-Type Continental.

Oh, and a couple more fascinating Blower nuggets, both buried on its ‘options list’. Extras on a new car usually comprise bigger wheels and posher leather. On the 4 ½ litre recreation? You can ask Bentley to replicate the divot in the floor created by Sir Tim Birkin’s shoe as he worked the throttle hard during Le Mans. And you can also get a copy of the lap timer he used… which was a scorekeeper half-inched from a local bar’s pool table before the race. You’d have both, right?