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Last year, Bentley announced that it would recreate Sir Tim Birkin’s 1929 supercharged 4½-litre “Blower”. Only 12 units of the car would be made - hand assembled by Bentley Mulliner’s Classic division. The company has now finished preparing the CAD model of the car, which is expected to serve as the master design and engineering reference.



Only four original ‘Team Blowers’ were built for racing by Birkin, in the late 1920s. All were campaigned on the racetracks of Europe, with the most famous car – Birkin’s own Team Car No. 2, registration UU 5872 – racing at Le Mans and playing a pivotal role in the factory Bentley Speed Six victory in 1930. The car's 4398 cc, 4-cylinder engine developed 240 bhp @ 4,200 rpm with the help of supercharger.

Bentley’s own Team Blower – chassis number HB 3403 - will be disassembled to its individual components, before each part is catalogued and meticulously scanned in 3D to create a complete digital model of the entire car. Using the original 1920s moulds and tooling jigs, and an array of traditional hand tools alongside the latest manufacturing technology, 12 sets of parts will then be created, before Bentley’s skilled heritage technicians assemble the new Blowers. The 12 continuations will be identical wherever possible to the original – mechanically and aesthetically– with only minimal hidden changes dictated by modern safety concerns.

Bentley’s Team Blower has been carefully dismantled and then re-created in the digital world through a combination of precision laser-scanning and intricate hand measurement. The finished CAD model is comprised of 630 components across 70 assemblies, and is more than 2GB in size.

From start to finish it’s taken 1200 man-hours for two dedicated CAD engineers to complete the model from the scan data and measurements, and the result is that an accurate and complete digital model for a 1920s Bentley now exists for the very first time. The engineers have been able to complete the model while working remotely during the COVID-19 crisis.

Apart from the process of assisting the development of parts design and development, the CAD model has also been able to assist with the specification of individual customers’ cars, with Bentley’s Design team able to create accurate full-colour renders from the data. While the Continuation Series cars will be mechanically identical to the Team Blower, customers are now in the process of choosing their own exterior and interior colours palettes and materials so that the cars are visually distinctive from their predecessor.

Full Press release