{"id":19990,"date":"2019-03-29T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-03-29T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.secret-classics.com\/bentley-4-5-liter-blower-2\/"},"modified":"2020-10-05T18:44:55","modified_gmt":"2020-10-05T18:44:55","slug":"bentley-4-5-liter-blower-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.secret-classics.com\/en\/bentley-4-5-liter-blower-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Bentley 4.5 Liter Blower"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

If there is one saying from Walter Owen Bentley, which is known to this day, then probably this: “Displacement is irreplaceable, except by more displacement!” Following this motto, he and his team worked on both the road vehicles and the race cars of Bentley, the company he founded exactly 100 years ago in Cricklewood. At the end of the 1928 racing season it became clear, that the previously used 4\u00bd-Liter Bentley wouldn’t be competitive in the following year. As a result, the engineers continued to develop the straight-six engine further and increased it to 6\u00bd liters. Successful, as the Speed Six racecars won the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1929 and 1930.

The former factory racing drivers were known as ‘The Bentley Boys’, from today’s perspective a group of rich gentlemen with a heavy right foot. One of them was Sir Henry ‘Tim’ Birkin. He didn’t really liked the idea of bigger engines as they also weighed more. Instead, he asked the technicians about using the then relatively new superchargers to compress the intake air of the 4\u00bd-Liter model. Funded by Dorothy Paget, he converted his own 4\u00bd-Liter with a Roots supercharger in his own initiative. At this time, the company no longer belonged to W.O. Bentley due to financial problems, but to another Bentley Boy, Woolf Barnato, who might be known to some readers for his famous race against ‘The Blue Train’. To the disfavor of the company founder – “to supercharge a Bentley engine was to pervert its design and corrupt its performance” – Barnato made five copies of the Bentley 4\u00bd-Liter Supercharged for Birkin, who used them in different racing events. To comply with the racing regulations of the time, also 50 street-legal versions were built.<\/p>\n\n\n

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