Le Mans, by Bentley

And then goes. If there’s one thing I’d least expected about this gargantuan behemoth is that, by the standard of drum brakes designed in the 1920s if no other, it stops absolutely brilliantly. The moment passes. At the chicane exit the little Austin jumps  aside like a startled fawn and on we thunder towards Mulsanne.

The above is just one of an essentially unlimited number of snapshots I could provide describing my weekend racing Bentley’s own continuation ‘Blower’ at the Le Mans Classic. If you had told the 10-year-old me that one day I’d race a Bentley, for Bentley, at Le Mans, I’d have suggested you needed to have a little lie down. But race it I did.

The idea was simple: Bentley had made and sold these dozen new continuation Blowers, as exact replicas of ‘Tim’ Birkin’s own Team Car, and will soon start making a dozen of the no less legendary ‘Old Number One’ Speed Six that won Le Mans in 1929 and 1930. And it hoped that by racing its Blower at the place Birkin raced his all those years ago, it might encourage owners to do the same with theirs, while showcasing the skills its Mulliner in-house personal commissioning department has now acquired.

The car itself really is identical to how that original Birkin car was in 1930 and when it comes to racing, that’s a big, fat disadvantage. Because yes, you can be sure the performance, handling and feel of the thing will be as close to indistinguishable from that experienced by the great man all those years ago, but you can be equally sure that’s a game being played by few, if any, others on the grid. Because all racing cars, even historic racing cars, evolve. They may look the same, but they are not. They have more power, sometimes immensely so, they handle better, are lighter and stop better too. This might explain how a Bentley billed as having a humble 3-litre engine was able to flash past my supercharged, 4.4-litre Bentley on every straight we encountered.

But for Bentley there could be no other approach. Just turning up as a factory team with a brand new car in a paddock full of private entrants paints a big enough target on your back, and one thing Bentley was adamant about was that, new as they were, the two cars entered – one factory owned, the other factory run for a private customer – would be the most standard cars on the grid.

And if that didn’t slow us down enough the rulemakers then mandated we had to take 90 seconds over every pit stop because these were continuation cars, while everyone else had 60 second stops. Imagine, for a moment, just how fast a company with Bentley’s resources could make such a car go if it put its mind to it, and if it distressed the body a bit, swiped the plate off Birkin’s motor and entered it as original… But being honest about the car’s age and scrupulous about its specification was the only way forward, regardless of its effect on our lap times. And I applaud the team for it.

I’d be driving with the Morley brothers, the fourth generation of a Bentley racing dynasty and as quick as they come in such cars. Stuart Morley is driving the customer car by himself while James and I are sharing the factory car. They do at least 20 race weekends a year while I, after abortive outings at the Spa Six Hours last year and one other club meeting, and Covid before that have not actually completed a single competitive racing lap for over three years.

I know how to drive these cars, handle their synchro-free gearboxes and not tread on the wrong pedal by mistake, but racing one, here, for Bentley? What was I thinking of? I’d last driven at the Classic in 2012 and couldn’t even remember the track in more than outline form.

I think probably the only smart thing I did was call Darren Turner, ace Aston Martin racer, three times class winner at Le Mans and, more pertinent to my needs, owner of Base Performance Simulators just outside Banbury. I explained what I was doing and asked if he had something pre-war programmed into one of his simulators. And he did, but pointed out that if I used it, I’d waste most of my allotted time droning down the circuit’s straights. For familiarisation, would something which would do twice the number of laps in the time not be more appropriate? Which is how my prep for racing a vintage Bentley at Le Mans involved driving a simulation of an LMP3 prototype.

I cannot stress how much better the sim was than, say, using a home computer setup and even quite a big screen. In the sim everything is projected as large as you see it in real life and you can see to your sides and behind you too. The seat moves with the simulated motion of the car. It genuinely feels quite like the real thing. With professional advice on lines, where I could be a bit greedy with run off, which kerbs I might take and those to avoid, thanks to Darren and Base Performance, one huge concern about the weekend was removed before I arrived.

At the circuit for real, Bentley had brought a chief engineer and two technicians for each car all, like us drivers, reporting into team manager Dave Argent. Dave is a friendly, affable kind of guy, but he knows exactly what we’re here to do, which is to demonstrate to the historic racing community and wider, Bentley-centric world that his team has built an honest yet credible race car and which will compete hard, fast and fair with those who’ve been doing it for decades. We know we’re not going to win anything, because even if our car was much modified, even if we didn’t have longer pit stops than anyone else, there’s no way a car derived from a 1920s road model is going to be quicker than Grand Prix Bugattis and straight-eight supercharged Alfas designed years later.

Qualifying goes well. James sets a time good enough for 26th place on a grid of over 80 cars, putting us, with our sister car, in the top three Bentleys out there. I use the time simply to confirm what I learned in Darren’s sim and to familiarise myself with the sight, sound, feel and operation of this extraordinary machine.

When we’re done a spectator comes up and, looking at that extraordinary dash with all its instruments and controls, the reversed pedals and so on, asks if the car is as difficult to drive as it looks. And I think the answer is ‘not really’. Like most things truly worthwhile, it takes some learning and a bit of practice to get right, but so does riding a bicycle. When you know how it operates the more relevant question becomes, ‘how easy is it to drive flat out?’, and that was something to which I did not yet know the answer.

It didn’t come in night qualifying either, which I used purely to see what the track looked like in the dark. Some of it is very well illuminated, other parts not lit at all. The sole modification we carry – and are absolutely permitted to carry in the rules – is a pair of additional spotlights which will render the vast but hopeless period-style Bentley lights almost entirely redundant.

Race day. The event was sold out, the grandstands packed. Later I learned 285,000 people turned up over the weekend.

Dave had a gleam in his eye, me a lump in my throat. After three years out, this was one hell of a way to go racing again. Our three races were due at approximately 4pm on Saturday, midnight and 8am on Sunday. The first required the old Le Mans start, with drivers sprinting across the track, a delight I was only too happy to leave to James, 20 years younger and 20kg lighter (at least) as he is. It’s all for fun because the cars then form up behind a safety car and only start racing once a full lap has been completed. Except James never made it even to the safety car. ‘It sounded pretty unhappy when I fired it up,’ he said later, ‘then it just died.’ We were the first to retire in the first race of the main Le Mans Classic, out before the first lap was complete. Not good.

Dave was appalled. ‘This car has been bombproof. It’s done thousands of miles, done all the development testing for the Blower programme and it just runs and runs and runs. And now this…’

‘This’ turned out to be a 50p fuse which had blown, shutting down the fuel pumps, and it wasn’t hard to find what had blown it: it was the only non-Bentley bit on the car: those additional bloody driving lamps. So the good news was that the car would be good to go for the night race; the less good news was that we’d be starting at the back and with 1920s-spec lights alone, we’d not be able to see where we were going.

For the first time in over half a lifetime of racing cars, I wondered whether I’d finally lost the plot. A million and half’s worth of car, probably more as it’s the prototype and Bentley’s own. A factory drive. The most public stage in historic racing. A track I’d not raced on for 11 years. And I was about to return to racing after three years out in the middle of the bloody night. There was not one thing about any of it that seemed even remotely sensible, let alone wise.

And yet, despite the experience described in the opening paragraphs, I survived. Due to our retirement in the first race we started the second in seventy-somethingth position. But thanks to some furious driving from James and me discovering there were plenty out there even more scared than I, we finished 28th, almost back where we started. Better still, and I have no ready explanation for this save that James must have hit a lot of traffic, I set the car’s fastest lap and that’s what determined the grid position for the final race in the morning, which we’d start in 22nd place. Which meant that in the course of one 43-minute race in the middle of the night, we’d made up at least 50 places. ‘A decent evening’s work,’ as Dave put it. I was so happy I could have cried.

The last race was a joy, not least because I could see. James got us up to 17th place before the pit stop, some of which we then lost having to stay parked longer than anyone else, most of which I’d got back by the end. We finished 19th, a top 20 finish from a standard car, with a pit stop penalty, having started the previous race over 50 places further down the grid. I won’t trouble you with the details but will, instead, take you round for one quickish lap in the Blower.

You come past the pits in third, then grab fourth before angling into the curve at the end. It’s reasonably easy to stay flat but you need to stay focussed because as soon as you’re through you’re hard on the brakes for the Dunlop chicane. Toes hard on brake, you ease the gearlever into neutral while using your heel to give the engine a really big blip to match its speed to that of the incoming gear. The chicane is third gear, keeping off the kerb but allowing the car to run right out to the exit and into the swerves down the hill. You’re still in third but the revs are rising. The normal maximum engine speed is 3500rpm, but 3800rpm is permissible if it saves two slow changes up and down again. Once in a blue moon, and if it means gaining a position, 4000rpm is allowable, but any more and you will destroy the engine.

Hold the revs at 3800rpm while gritting your teeth, then brake slightly for the Esses before getting hard on the power and into fourth for Tertre Rouge. Both Morley brothers were taking it flat, while I gave it the merest lift, probably through fear though I told myself it helped get the nose turned in.

Then it’s the straight, the only time you get to look at the dials and check that the oil feed to the supercharger bearings are dripping nicely. Brake for the first chicane from around 115mph just past the 300 metre board, turn in on the brakes in fourth, but be in third by the apex, power through, back to fourth, then repeat for the mirror image second chicane. Next comes Mulsanne, approached through a near flat kink followed by a flurry of footwork and a couple of double declutched, heel and toed downshifts to second, while also trying to position the brute as accurately on the road as possible. It is fair to say you’re quite busy.

You’re now on the most original part of the circuit and you go thundering off over kinked crests, flat out once more, towards Indianapolis, a third gear left preceded by a fourth gear right. So much of what occupies your head are thoughts of just how bad it might be if you got it wrong, so you need each downshift to be clean and exact – the brakes alone are not strong enough to shed the speed by themselves. A short straight to Arnage, second gear and now you need to take that vast Bakelite steering wheel rim and haul it in the other direction. The muscles in your arms and upper body are already starting to sing.

But there’s a brief respite while you get this massive bus back into three-figure territory before the Porsche Curves. You can take them at the top end of third or bottom of fourth. They should be a nightmare in a car like this, but they’re not: it’s perfectly balanced, keen to sniff out an apex and slide away from it. Then the two fiddly Ford chicanes, a deep breath, a thumbs up to the team as you pass the pit and repeat. When the flag fell for the last time, well, I was glad to be alone in the car.

There were so many memories of driving that fabulous machine around that fabulous circuit at that fabulous event, but once we were done what actually meant more than all of it were the smiles, handshakes and kind words of the team who’d worked so hard for so long to get the car race ready and make sure it stayed that way all weekend. The only thing that persuaded me to get in the car for that night stint was the thought of how much I’d let them down if I did not. And if it turned out to be the last thing I ever did in a racing car, I’d sign off my account feeling I’d been blessed.

Photography by Jayson Fong