Andrew Frankel: ‘Driving a continuation Bentley Blower at Le Mans’

Since we last met I’ve had the privilege of racing in the Le Mans Classic, driving for Bentley in its own continuation supercharged ‘Blower’, a facsimile recreation of the car Sir Henry Birkin raced here in 1930. There are those who get unbelievably sniffy about such cars because they are new, without perhaps being aware of how common brand new cars are in the world of historic motor sport. But there are two big differences between the continuation Blowers and many other new cars that are effective clones of period racing machines. First, Bentley has never tried to conceal the fact the cars (for there are 12 customer cars as well) are new. Second, the Blowers are to the identical specification of the original. By contrast for many others the motivation to clone stems from being able to race a car with all manner of performance enhancing refinements without having to spoil the originality of their ‘real’ car.

At Le Mans the fact that the car I was driving was designed to the same specification as a 1930 4.4-litre supercharged Bentley led to the curious spectacle of it being left for dust in a straight line by another Bentley claiming to have no more than 3 litres of naturally aspirated engine under its bonnet. But because Bentley was honest about the origin of its car, we had to spend 30 seconds longer in our pitstops than any other car on the grid.

Am I complaining? Not really, because I was blessed to be driving it and back at the Le Mans Classic and because, despite our standard specification and everlasting pitstops, co-driver James Morley and I still ended up finishing inside the top 20 of a grid topping 80 cars, including GP Bugattis and younger straight-eight Alfas.

But I’d still welcome formal clarification surrounding the issue of whether a car is original, to original specification, modified or brand new. I have no problem with cars from all these categories racing, but I’d like to see owners bound to declare formally their car’s status on the entry form. Simply not owning up is a rather different thing to lying on an official document and I think people would like to know what they’re looking at, while fellow competitors have a right to know what they’re up against.

“It’s the depth of the research in Tyrrell that really stands out”

A few days before I went to Le Mans I became unexpectedly cowed by the entire prospect. Because of a disastrous 2022 and Covid prior to that, I realised I’d not raced competitively in over three years. Yet here I was expecting to head out on to a circuit I’d not raced on in over a decade, in a car I’d never raced before, sharing with someone who’s a fourth-generation Bentley racer who races dozens of times every year. What’s more I was doing it all for Bentley in, as the team was proud to point out, the first factory Bentley to race at Le Mans since it won the 24 Hours in 2003…

But instead of panicking, I rang Darren Turner who not only knows his way around the track better than most, having won his class in the 24 Hours three times for Aston Martin, but who also owns Base Performance Simulators just outside Banbury, and booked myself a slot.

All I wanted to do was familiarise myself with the track layout and, specifically, the turn-in, apex and exit points of each corner so Darren advised me to drive something fast which would provide the maximum number of laps for the time I had. So I settled into the virtual cockpit of an LMP3 car, headed out and learned enough so that when I first ventured onto the circuit for real, it was as familiar as if I’d last raced there a couple of weeks back, not in 2012.

Of course I could just have borrowed someone’s PlayStation, but it really isn’t the same. You don’t get the track projected in 1:1 scale in front of you, you don’t get to see to your sides, you don’t get the cockpit responding to your inputs and you don’t get a seasoned pro critiquing your lines. I found the entire experience absolutely invaluable and without it I’d have been completely lost at Le Mans. It’s not a toy and I’d advise taking travel sickness medicine before, but if you have a new and daunting circuit to learn I could not recommend it more highly.

I returned from Le Mans to find Richard Jenkins’ Tyrrell book waiting for me. This is not a book solely about the man, nor its heyday when Jackie Stewart was racing. Instead it is a history of the Tyrrell Racing Organisation from Ken ‘Chopper’ Tyrrell’s first race in a 500, to the team’s sad eventual sale to British American Racing. To give you an idea, the period in Formula 1 up until the tragic loss of François Cevert and JYS’s retirement accounts for barely 100 of the 450 pages of narrative.

It’s a terrific tale, expertly told, but it’s the depth of the research in facts and photographs that really stands out. Full of images I’d not seen before, letters between individuals at key points in the company’s history, drawings, notes and memos, it provides a complete picture of the company from its earliest days rather than anything so mundane as a straightforward narrative. And at the back are details of every car created by Tyrrell as a constructor followed by every result achieved by Tyrrell as a team. In short, it’s one of the best books of its kind I’ve read in a very long time.

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A former editor of Motor Sport, Andrew splits his time between testing the latest road cars and racing (mostly) historic machinery
Follow Andrew on Twitter @Andrew_Frankel