Video: Bentley Blower* vs Steam Train

Bentley’s ‘Blowers’ were the Bugatti Chiron Super Sports of their day: enormous dark green monsters with a supercharger hung from the front like a big boosty beard. Good for 240bhp in race trim, the Blowers set record speeds at Le Mans and Brooklands, and cemented Bentley’s reputation as a motorsport heavyweight. Literally.

But racing other cars wasn’t enough for Bentley… company chairman Woolf Barnato (great name) decided to race a road-going Speed Six against a luxury continental train, all the way from the French Riviera to London. And the Bentley won!

So, when we heard Oxfordshire’s Little Car Company was building a totally road-legal 85 per cent scale replica of a Blower, complete with 25 horsepower… that gave us an idea. A miniature Bentley, versus a tiny train, in a rematch more than 100 years in the making.

Join Top Gear’s Ollie Kew for an in-depth tour and test drive as the shrunken Blower takes on a nine-tonne train from the Romney Hythe & Dymchurch Railway in Kent, England.