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Legendary Blower Bentley makes history at Bonhams auction
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One of the greatest of all Bentleys, the special single-seater Blower Bentley made by Sir Tim Birkin for success at Brooklands went under the hammer recently and came up with the honour of being the highest price ever garnered by a Bentley at auction! The massive and butch red-coloured Blower Bentley made history at the Bonhams auction held on the first day of this year's Goodwood Festival of Speed when it was acquired by an unknown buyer bidding via telephone for a sum of Pounds 5,041,500 making it the priciest Bentley ever in history!
Tim Birkin, one of the original Bentley boys and a ferociously competitive soul to boot wanted a crack at not just winning the Le Mans 24 Hours but also the Brooklands 500 with special emphasis on setting the outright lap record on the Byfleet oval’s fearsome banked but bumpy Outer Circuit. He knew that the standard 4.5-litre four-cylinder was not capable of winning consistently thanks to the heavy car not having the power in the face of newer competition.
Supercharging then was the way to go and Birkin first drew in supercharging expert Amherst Villiers to design and develop a special supercharger for the Bentley. Next he got fellow driver and South African diamond heir Woolf Barnato (then also the financial backer to Bentley Motors) to bless the project before finally dazzling the Hon. Dorothy Wyndham Paget to put up the money to finance the race campaign. The latter was needed because W O Bentley didn’t care much for supercharging and so didn’t want to do much with the car and this parallel race effort anyway.
This special car first carried a canvas body stretched over a spring-steel lattice frame structure. It was painted blue but it caught fire during the 1929 Brooklands 500 Miles Race. Undeterred, Birkin turned to Reid A Railton who designed a new body using aluminium beaten into the form intended by A P Compton & Co. The car was now painted red and all of a sudden it seemed the fortunes changed.
Birkin won some great races at Brooklands with this car till early 1933 and some of them were the stuff of legend. He also set the Outer Circuit lap record, which was so dear to his heart. Unfortunately, in early 1933 while racing at Tripoli in Libya, Birkin suffered burns that saw him afflicted by septicaemia and he died in July that year.
The car remained with the Hon. Dorothy Paget, unused till it was sold to a Bentley enthusiast who converted it back to a two-seater! Thankfully he retained the single-seater shell and from a progression of owners it finally landed in the George Daniels collection. Daniels is renowned as one of the world’s greatest horologists and he was a long time Bentley enthusiast.
On his death, his entire collection went under the hammer, the famous auction house of Bonhams entrusted with the sale, which also included another Daniels Bentley that had an India connect. This was Maharaja of Bhavnagar’s 1929 Bentley 4.5-litre four-seat tourer, which realised £471,900! And if that wasn’t all, a complete Bentley 4.5-litre engine in Daniel’s possession went for £59,740!
Mega is the only word that comes to mind!
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