Bentley’s brand-new Blower took 40,000 hours to finish

After a whopping 40,000 man hours, Bentley has finally completed ‘Car Zero’ – the first Blower it’s built in 90 years, and the prototype for the 12 Blower Continuation Series cars it’s doing for a dozen incredibly lucky, unimaginably wealthy petrolheads.

The new/old car, constructed from many thousands of specially designed and fabricated parts, will be put through “months of durability and performance testing”. Bentley says the programme “is designed to achieve the equivalent of 35,000 kilometres of real-world driving across 8,000 kilometres of track driving, and simulates the undertaking of famous rallies such as Peking to Paris and Mille Miglia”.

Bentley used original drawings and tooling from the 1920s, and entirely dismantled and laser-scanned its own Blower, to make sure Car Zero is totally faithful to the original. It also called upon a load of specialist companies to create the necessary components. The company that hand-formed the heavy-gauge steel chassis, for example, normally makes boilers for steam locomotives and traction engines, so it has the “skills to forge and shape metal in a traditional way”.

Everything is just so. Take the 4.5-litre engine, which is built to original spec, right down to the magnesium crankcase and Amherst Villiers roots-type supercharger. Bentley had to extensively modify its engine testing facility to get the new/old engine to fit, including building a replica Blower front chassis and writing new software for the computers.

Owners have already specced their cars. Car Zero is finished in black with red Bridge of Weir leather. Per the original, each seat is stuffed with 10kg of horsehair.

The Blower Continuations are being built by the ‘Classic’ arm of Bentley’s Mulliner division. The ‘Coachbuilt’ third of Mulliner is handling the production of the Bacalar, while the ‘Collections’ department develops Mulliner-spec add-ons for Bentley’s existing cars.