Bentley is to make 12 “continuation” examples of the supercharged 4.5-liter Birkin “Blower,” one of those cars whose legend far surpasses its achievement. For a time it could claim to be the world’s fastest car, but it was built for racing and in that context it must be regarded as a disappointment.
Part of its reputation derived from the personality of Sir Henry “Tim” Birkin, perhaps the most accomplished of the Bentley Boys. The Bentley Boys were part of the mystique of the 1920s along with flappers and jazz. Apart from success at Le Mans, where the marque won five times, almost all of their racing was in Britain with Birkin being an exception. The reputation of the Bentley Boys, as drivers, is more myth than substance but, hey, they knew how to party.
Birkin’s family came from Nottingham, for centuries England’s center for making lace, a detail somehow missing from the Robin Hood tales. In the 19th Century an ancestor found a way of industrializing lace production, which netted him a fortune and also a baronetcy, an hereditary knighthood which passed down to Henry.
When he was small, Henry became besotted with the adventures of Tiger Tim, a popular comic strip, which is how he became known as “Tim”. During WWI he served as a pilot with the Royal Flying Corps and in Palestine he contracted malaria, a condition which haunted him for the rest of his life. On his return to civilian life he competed in some low-key motoring events while mainly concentrating on the family business. In 1928, however, he bought a 4.5-liter Bentley and took up the sport seriously.
Birkin was a handsome man and a fearless driver and the fact that he wore a blue and white spotted silk scarf was commented on and became a trademark. He was loved by the press and became a hero to schoolboys.
In 1932, he published a ghost-written autobiography, Full Throttle, a title so good that it has been appropriated many times, including by Charlie’s Angels, of whom Tim would have approved. In his book he criticized Brooklands as being obsolete and dangerous and called on the British government to invest in motor racing, as Mussolini was doing in Italy. Brooklands sued for libel, but Birkin was dead before the case came to court. He was driving a Maserati 8C-3000 in the 1933 Tripoli Grand Prix when, during a pit stop, he burned his arm on an exhaust pipe.
Birkin did not get the burn treated, blood poisoning resulted and he died. The fact that he had never shaken off malaria did not help. By 1933, he could not afford a complete pit crew and so was lending a hand. He finished third in the Grand Prix behind Achille Varzi and Tazio Nuvolari, he had been mixing it with the best.
More than 20 years after Birkin died, his publisher re-issued Full Throttle in an inexpensive format. It sold well because there were few motor racing books in the 1950s. Mercedes-Benz commissioned bland biographies of Neubauer, Lang and Caracciola to make out that they had nothing to do with the recent unpleasantness, whereas Mercedes-Benz and Auto Union had used motor racing to secure military contracts. Caracciola, however, had become a naturalized Swiss.
Airfix models made a fine 1:12 model of a blower Bentley and it came in a box. In every British high street was a branch of F W Woolworth and Woolworth’s had done a deal with Airfix to market cut-price kits and for two shillings, the price of a cheap paperback novel. The standout car was a 1:32 model of a blower Bentley, which, to keep the price down, came in a plastic bag with the instructions stapled to it.
Every Brit enthusiast of mature years has a Woolworth Bentley in his life if only because it was the only car kit Airfix. It was a finely detailed kit and, most importantly, it had the ‘blower’, the supercharger. What we did not know was that the weight of the supercharger out front, adversely affected the handling, exaggerating the base car’s tendency to understeer. At the time. supercharging was a sexy word.
Then there was Bond, James Bond, the only secret agent daft enough to tell strangers his real name. The clue, Bond, is in “secret”. Before the movies, a popular British newspaper ran a Bond comic strip and in the first three books Bond drove a blower Bentley. It was one of the 50 made for homologation, not a Birkin team car. He had bought it in 1933, stored it during the War and had it maintained by a former Bentley mechanic.
It was written off in the third book, Moonraker, when Bond went up against Hugo Drax who, being a villain, drove a Mercedes-Benz. This was the 1950s, remember.
Is it any wonder that the Blower Bentley seeped into the consciousness of some of us? Not long ago, I received a blue and white spotted silk scarf as a birthday present. The giver is not at all interested in motor racing, but knew that a driver called Birkin had worn one. It was a period detail that had somehow stuck, like the name of a popular cabaret star of the time.
WO Bentley believed in cubic capacity, but Birkin liked superchargers which had been used with success by some European manufacturers. Journalists loved trying to capture the sound, “like ripping calico” is my favorite, but I still wonder how the hack knew what calico sounded like when being ripped. Silk, yes, but calico?
Birkin commissioned Amherst Villiers to supercharge his car. Villiers had designed Malcolm Campbell’s 1927 successful LSR car and, post-war, worked on a NASA space program. He was also an accomplished painter and portraits he executed of Ian Fleming and Graham Hill are in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery in London. The blower (supercharger) increased power from 130 bhp to 240 bhp, but made the engine more fragile.
Birkin had won Le Mans, in 1929, in a Bentley Speed Six which produced 200 bhp and which had lasted the distance. His co-driver at Le Mans had been Woolf Barnato, heir to a South African diamond fortune, who had become the majority shareholder in Bentley. Birkin went to Barnato, over the head of WO, who agreed that the factory would build 50 supercharged cars, to homologate the model, plus a further five for competition.
Bond drove one of the 50 but Fleming did not vouchsafe which coachbuilder he chose. Birkin, who took four cars, had his bodywork made by R. Harrison, a short-lived London company, notable for Flexible Coachwork. This was a fabric on wood body along the lines of Weymann, but sufficiently different to be granted its own patents.
Birkin had a problem; in financial terms he was running on fumes. The lace making industry had been in decline since the end of WWI and Birkin had been spending like a drunk sailor on shore leave. To the rescue came the unlikely figure of the Hon. Dorothy Paget, daughter of Lord Queensborough.
There had once been a satisfactory formula: American money married English title. One result had been Winston Churchill.
At the time, Paget was one of the best known women in England, as an owner and breeder of race horses. She was also a bull dyke, as butch as Kong. Somewhere along the line, she and Birkin were related—money usually is—and he had given her driving lessons at Brooklands. He had also been sensible enough to praise her driving. Dorothy Paget agreed to finance Birkin’s team of four cars. The arrangement lasted less than a year, but Paget continued to be Birkin’s individual patron.
To make the continuation cars, Bentley will reverse-engineer Birkin’s own car, which the company owns. What Bentley’s press releases have not said is that the 12 cars will not be road-legal, unless you own the country or at least the local police force. This has been true of almost every continuation car, though there is a road-legal Knobbly Lister-Jaguar.
If you buy an XKSS from Jaguar, you buy a track day only car but rivet-for-rivet reproductions have been made which are road-legal. The whole point of the XKSS was that it was road-legal, as was the D-type from which it derived. The D-type raced by Henry Taylor and Jim Clark was bought by a chap called Alan Ensoll, who added weather equipment for everyday use. He would drive it to a circuit, remove the weather kit and the spare wheel, and race it. In period it was sometimes mistaken for an XKSS.
The trick is to have an appropriate donor car. A video from Bob Petersen, high-grad recreator of vintage Bentleys, begins with a ‘barn find’, which is sometimes a euphemism for a scrap yard. It is a case of grandfather’s ax. Was there a grandfather? Did he own an ax?
If you buy a continuation car, you have the satisfaction that it has been sanctioned by the original maker. That does not make it more authentic than a skilled recreation. The craftspeople who make the continuation cars are not the same as those who made the originals, the only thing which connects them is the name on the company notepaper.
I once saw Bentley Continental GTZ #4 being made, Z for Zagato. I did not witness Luigi carressing metal over a tree stump in Lombardy, I was in an industrial estate in England, at CPP (Coventry Prototype Panels.) At the time, CPP was in the process of buying Zagato. Elsewhere in the same workshop, CPP was making parts for the Aston Martin One-77.
Aston Martin makes much of its tenuous link to Zagato. The DB4 was styled by Touring, which employed its superleggera construction. Zagato made pretty bodies for a handful of the Aston Martin DB4 GT. Two were lightweight and driven by the like of Jim Clark. Not even Clark could win with one but they have become “iconic”.
Naturally, the Bentley press release has “iconic” in its first sentence. When I am king, anyone who uses “iconic” more than twice in a 12-month period will be imprisoned with a thesaurus both as a companion and as their sole source of food. That way we may restore meaning to a word which once was useful, when used sparingly, but which is now used all the time by the most frightful people.
For a brief time, the DB4 GT was the fastest road car, but it achieved little. True, the prototype won a production sports car race on its debut at Silverstone in 1959, but even the BBC commentator questioned whether it was actually a production car. Then it was driven by Stirling Moss, which was like adding a supercharger.
Aston Martin has managed to persuade wealthy customers that the DB4 GT was something, which it was not. Unlike the Blower Bentley, it grew neither a legend nor a mythology. Zagato is another matter, if you can ignore the idea of Luigi shaping a panel on a tree stump in Lombardy.
Continuation cars are sold on the back of history, real or imagined. The Birkin Bentley was conceived as a racecar and it failed. Zagato bodies are not supposed to be made on an industrial estate in England even though that is where the craftsmanship is.
Have someone in Milan to style your suit, but get it made in Savile Row.
CPP was suckered by a Russian con man called Vladimir Antonov, who is currently serving time so this means that I can reveal a few things. Antonov left a trail of ruin behind him, which included at least two banks in Lithuania and Portsmouth Football Club, your actual Pompey. Antonov claimed to have big money at his disposal and he arranged for the Dutch company, Spyker, to have its cars made by CPP. He also arranged for CPP to buy Zagato, which it did.
CPP went bust soon after Antonov arrived, but was rescued by Envisage, a local company in the same line of business. Presumably Envisage now owns Zagato as well, it certainly owns the means of production.
What is important is the name on the company notepaper. I would chose a Lynx Engineering XKSS over a “continuation” one because it is road-legal, which was the whole point of the car. The Lynx version was also better made than the original.
Some people are paying a lot for the name on company notepaper.
