The bonsai Blower

First, it’s the largest car of its kind The Little Car Company has made, realised at an 85 per cent scale to the original, itself a substantial bit of ironmongery. Second and at least in the UK, EU and US, it is fully road legal. In Britain it qualifies as a heavy quadricycle which means it can weigh no more than 450kg without its batteries, or 600kg with them. Power is restricted to 20bhp, top speed to 56mph and you need a full driving licence to drive one in public.

Those requirements have forced some compromises upon this tandem two-seat Bentley Blower Jnr, most notably those two poles that sprout from each of the passenger compartments and onto which the seatbelts are fitted. Without them the car is not legal for road use. So too must it make a robotic electronic whirring noise below 20mph so others can hear it coming. There are those black on white numberplates and an aero screen which has to be made rather small as were it any larger it would need to be a full windscreen complete with wiper system. Who knows the lengths to which owners might privately go to address these issues once they have taken delivery?

Besides, that’s the price you pay for being able to drive one of these in public. Oh, and the £108,000 (including taxes) required to buy one of the 99 ‘First Edition’ cars in British Racing Green with hand painted Union Flags on their sides. There are entire Porsche 911s that cost less than that.

Sorry if I’ve just caused you to choke on your coffee, but I’m not going to get into the whole, to me, spurious argument over whether it is worth it or not: this is not a car in a category with similar competitors between which you’re likely to want to choose. There’s literally nothing else like it out there and you’ll either like, want and be able to afford it or you won’t. What I can tell you is what it is, and what it’s like to drive.

The aim of Ben Hedley, founder and boss of The Little Car Company, was to create something providing as close to a flavour of the original as a road legal battery-powered quadricycle could hope to manage. To that end, he has asked both me – as someone who has driven and raced a full-sized Le Mans-specification Blower – and the original along. This is not a press launch event – that will happen later in the year – and the Blower Jnr you see here is a prototype, the car they’re still trying to perfect before customers start receiving cars towards the end of the year. I’d say it’s about 85 per cent of the way there, fitting enough for an 85 per cent scale car. I’m here to drive both it and the original and suggest what more development it needs before it’s ready to meet its public.

One of the challenges Hedley and his team faced was to make the Junior look as much like the senior without putting anything on it that was purely decorative, the problem being a 1930s Le Mans car is a lot more visually complex than a 2024 EV quadricycle. But the basics are there: the enormous ‘fuel tank’ at the back is actually a luggage compartment, the ‘supercharger’ at the front where you plug it into the mains. There’s almost nothing under the bonnet, so in production cars that will be given over to storage space too.

Given these restrictions, it does look astonishingly similar. Size-wise the Junior is about halfway between a pre-war MG and a similar vintage racing Aston Martin. And the closer you get, the more the quality of the little car stands out. Its chassis is a scaled down version of the original’s ladder, with two longitudinal rails connected by horizontal crossmembers. But the body that sits on top is not built up around an ash frame, but is crafted entirely from carbon fibre, onto which fabric is applied. The bonnet now as then is aluminium and while this car’s radiator is brass, the production cars will be nickel. Like the big old Blower parked next to it, drive is directed to the rear wheels alone while suspension front and rear is similarly by leaf springs and adjustable lever arm dampers.

Access is quite correctly provided by a single door on the passenger side – there was no driver’s door at Le Mans, its pilots preferring to leap over the sill – and you take up station in a beautifully upholstered leather seat and survey instruments set into a turned aluminium dash. The attention to detail is impressive: I asked why the power reserve meter has a yellow background and a black needle while all the other dials have black backgrounds and white needles, only to be directed to the ammeter of the old car which for reasons unknown is also black on yellow.

There’s a small electronic screen to the right of the correctly cord-bound steering wheel which looks a little out of place, but which is a legal requirement to let you know when the car is ‘live’. Most of the time however it just shows a digital representation of a period clock. Controls for the headlamps and indicators have been incorporated into convincing-looking 1920s-era light switches, just as you’ll find on the genuinely blown Blower.

You hit the start button, wait for the screen to wake up, select drive from the three position switch on the left of the dash, squeeze the accelerator and you’re off. The view down the vented dash, with its leather straps, spare wheel jiggling on its mount to your left and over the front wings is really very little different. The Junior is not fast, and this one is limited to just over 40mph while testing, but it steps off the line very smartly and when allowed to run unlimited is never going to hold up anyone on a country lane.

It is, of course, never going to feel like the original, not least because it doesn’t shake and vibrate and carries about a quarter of its weight. But don’t just dismiss it as a modern EV in fancy dress, because it is anything but. The trick was to make it seem vintage, but only in the good sense. Which is why I suspected the majority of my job would likely be advising them how to degrade its ride until it felt authentic, without upsetting its stability. In fact that’s already been achieved. The steering does jiggle about in your hands, you can feel the suspension working and the chassis flexing, but directionally the Blower is absolutely nailed – just how you want it to be: the feel is faithful, entirely vintage in its quality, yet at the same time absolutely reassuring.

Part of its secret is that its batteries are slung in a line underneath the chassis, providing a centre of gravity lower than that of any road-legal Bentley in history. Despite its spindly wheels and skinny Blockley tyres it never feels remotely like it might want to fall over. Push it to its limits – which are far higher than you’d imagine until you realise it weighs the same as a Caterham – and all it wants to do is gently oversteer. The ride is better than the original’s too, as are the brakes: with Brembo discs at the front sourced from a Ducati its stopping power is beyond anything you might imagine given its appearance.

There are drawbacks, some which can be engineered out, others that cannot. In the former category is a front screen so small that tall drivers will want to wear goggles to protect themselves from debris thrown up by other road users, the steering is currently both too light and too slow and the beautifully crafted fly-off handbrake should ideally be a little further forward. Harder to fix will be a rear seat kids will enjoy occupying, but which adults will appreciate about as far as the pub but not a lot further, unless the driver has their seat set far forward.

Which really is what it is for. Hedley describes it as ‘the ultimate pub car’ and with a range of around 65 miles, I’d say he was bang on. When I was a kid my father was always dumping me in the back of some pre-war contraption or other and beetling off to the boozer to meet his mates for a pint, and I can just see the car park chat if you were to do something similar in the junior Blower today. Because it’s as big as plenty of real cars, I have no doubt many would not spot it for what it is and start asking questions about how old it was and whether it raced in period. Then you’d just saddle up and drive silently away while their jaws fell to the floor.

It is, of course, a hell of a lot of money to sink into a pure recreation of such limited use, but some people have a hell of a lot of money and they will likely be more interested in whether it looks right and feels right, whether they’ll enjoy driving it and enjoy even more the reaction of those seeing them driving it. And they will, massively. For Hedley and his team, that’s job done.

The original Blower Bentley

The story of this car’s performance at Le Mans in 1930 has passed into racing folklore. It is to be remembered how much WO Bentley hated the ‘Blower’ project, and that it was instead the all-consuming passion project of Tim Birkin. As such the Blowers that raced at Le Mans did so not once as factory cars but essentially as private entries.

Even so, faced with the greatest threat any pre-war Bentley would ever encounter on a race track – in the form of a 7-litre SSK Mercedes driven by Rudi Caracciola, Germany’s greatest and most successful racing driver until one M. Schumacher arrived on the scene – the two Bentley teams were always going to work together to meet the challenge.

And they knew the Mercedes had a flaw: unlike the Blowers whose superchargers were designed to be engaged all the time, the SSK’s supercharger was engaged by a clutch and intended for short periods of use only. If one Bentley driver might be prepared to drive like a complete lunatic right from the very start, even if it had terminal consequences, then perhaps by forcing the Merc to go faster than it cared to go and keeping that supercharger spinning, perhaps it could be stressed to breaking point. Never was a man better born to such a task than Birkin.

The line in the main story about him overtaking Caracciola at 125mph on the grass with a tyre in tatters is entirely true, as is the fact he broke the lap record despite his tyre’s thrown tread, which soon collapsed altogether. In time Birkin retired with engine failure, but by then the damage was done and when the Mercedes was seen parked up by the side of the road, WO knew his fifth, final and most famous Le Mans win was in the bag.

Today it seems barely believable I even get to sit in this car, let alone drive it on the public road. Every major component that was on the car that day 94 years ago – its chassis, engine, gearbox, body and back axle – remains on the car today. The instruments you look at, the wheel you turn, the pedals you press are all those seen, turned and trodden upon by Birkin all those years ago.

It remains in the finest of fettle: the engine fires instantly, burbles happily away at idle and never gets hot. There’s stuff you must learn about driving it – how to change gear with no syncromesh and remembering the brake is on the right and the accelerator in the middle – but the motor has so much torque and gearshift is so mechanical and precise driving it seems a lot more daunting than it actually is. At least when trundling along a country lane in Oxfordshire. Flat out in the dark down the Mulsanne Straight with Caracciola sniffing your unburned hydrocarbons would probably be a rather different matter…

Photography by Jonny Fleetwood

Last year Andrew raced a recreation Bentley at the Le Mans Classic. Read the story here