Bentley Blower Jnr Review: Completely Pointless, Utterly Brilliant

We could sit here for 1200ish words, questioning how and why we’ve reached a point where a small two-seater electric car with absolutely zero weather protection, a top speed of 45mph, and a real-world range of 60 miles on a really good day is on sale for very similar money to a brand new BMW M3.

Or we could simply appreciate the Bentley Blower Jnr for what it is: a beautifully crafted hit of pure automotive serotonin that brightens up the day of anyone that comes into contact with it.

Hedley Studios, the company Bentley tasked with creating it, used to be known as The Little Car Company. As founder and CEO Ben Hedley explained to us, the name change came about because under its old name, everyone thought it just made toy cars.

Sorry Ben, but you’re not fooling anyone. It may well have number plates, seatbelts and genuine room (just) for two adults in tandem formation, but the Blower Jnr is a toy, pure and simple – and that’s just fine.

Just as the 1:64-scale supercars we used to zoom across our bedroom floors could give our infant brains a taste of what it might be like to drive them for real, the Blower Jnr gives adults – admittedly, adults with £90,000 to spend on a simple indulgence – a flavour of rocketing down the Mulsanne Straight in a cacophony of four-cylinder thump and supercharger whine, peering into the night through oil-spattered goggles, when in reality they’re trundling to the pub on a sunny Sunday afternoon.

It’s a recreation, electrically-powered and in 85 per cent scale, of the Bentley 4½ Litre ‘Blower’. That’s the most famous of Bentley’s early Le Mans racers, despite never winning the great 24-hour race when equipped with the distinctive externally-mounted supercharger that gave it its nickname.

None of the Le Mans Blowers were quite alike, and the Jnr is specifically a recreation of Team Car No. 2. Raced at Le Mans in 1930 by Sir Tim Birkin and Jean Chassagne, it was sniffing at a win until it dropped a valve with four hours to go. It’s now part of Bentley’s heritage collection, in full running order but resplendent with nearly a century of patina.

Helpfully, Bentley brought this car over on the ferry to Jersey, where we were driving the Junior, and parked side-by-side, the accuracy of the recreation is staggering. Hedley’s managed to perfectly preserve the original’s thrusting proportions, not necessarily a given if you simply take a car and photocopy it on 85 per cent.

It’s the details that delight, though. The fuel tank has been repurposed as a boot big enough for a couple of shopping bags, the external gear change as a fly-off handbrake. The titular blower is now a different sort of charger – the port for juicing up the Jnr’s electric powertrain. 

The only blemishes are the unsightly posts sprouting upwards that serve as seatbelt anchor points, but without those, you couldn’t drive it on the road and experience what it’s like to cruise around in possibly the only £90,000 car that doesn’t make people hate you.

Bits of its construction, like the solid axles and leaf springs, are faithful to the original car, while others, like its carbon tub, aluminium bonnet and the tiddly Brembo disc brakes hidden behind the Borrani wire wheels are welcome concessions to modernity.

And yes, unlike most of what Hedley’s built before, the Blower Jnr’s road-legal. It’s technically an L7e ‘heavy quadricycle’, placing it a category above stuff like the Citroen Ami and in the same class, legally, as (whisper it) a G-Wiz. So you can drive it on the road, but should you?

Well, the channel island of Jersey was a cannily selected drive location, because the fastest you can legally go is 40mph, making it one of the few places on Earth where the 45mph Jnr can break the national speed limit. Just.

Trying to assess its driving dynamics in the context of normal cars is utterly pointless, but as Serious Road Testers™, we’re obliged to do so anyway. Shock horror: it’s not a sports car.

The electric motor makes just 20bhp but a healthier 98lb ft of torque. With all that coming instantly and the whole package weighing a Caterham-esque 550kg plus driver, it has the usual EV off-the-line spriteliness, but that quickly tails off. This doesn’t particularly matter, because 20mph when you’re so exposed to the elements feels like 60mph. At 40, you may as well be doing 100, especially with a stiff breeze blowing in off the English Channel.

There’s a sizeable off-centre area where your movement of the big string-wrapped wheel doesn’t necessarily correspond with how much the car turns, but the steering soon loads up and becomes as direct as you really need it to be when you’re only dealing with town-centre speeds and a 3.72-metre long vehicle.

The cornering is mostly pretty tame thanks to the speeds involved. There’s minimal body roll, and there’s no sawing away at the wheel like Birkin and Chassagne would have needed to do. Because it’s so small, though, it’s sensitive to camber, so lots of little corrections are needed on straights.

The car only ever felt challenged by a particularly steep, tight and wet uphill bend, where the unloaded inner rear wheel spun up in a flurry of electric motor whine. The brakes aren’t exactly confidence-inspiring, either – or they wouldn’t be in a bigger, faster vehicle. Here, the disarmingly squidgy pedal is never too much of a concern.

Mostly, the Blower Jnr is a joyously effortless thing to punt around in. Oh, and because it’s a very light car with a healthy slug of instant torque and very skinny tyres, you can provoke friendly stabs of micro-oversteer on wet bends, like a scaled-down, less scary version of what Birkin might have experienced coming off Mulsanne Corner.

In fact, the biggest sour point of the experience is the noise. Regulations mean it has to make a generic EV hum, and it’s as jarring as opening an episode of Downton Abbey with the Doctor Who theme tune. If you tire of this, though, you can just push the little foot-operated button by the left pedal that sounds the old-timey ‘awooga’ horn.

That horn, and the immediate giggle it elicits from bystanders, nicely sum up what makes the Blower Jnr so endlessly appealing to everyone that sees it. In a car industry that tends to take itself rather too seriously these days, it’s so welcome to drive something so totally unserious.

Even with just 349 to shift – 99 Launch Editions, with their Team Car-aping British Racing Green paint scheme, and 150 configurable standard versions – £90,000 is a heck of a lot for something so hopelessly impractical. Consider, for instance, the £42k Morgan Super 3, which offers similar beautiful craftsmanship and flies-in-the-teeth fun, but pairs it with actual car performance and the ability to go more than 60 miles before you need to refuel.

For a certain sort of person, though, nothing’s going to match the Vintage Le Mans Simulator experience provided by the Blower Jnr, and I commend anyone willing to drop M3 money on something as joyful as this. Is it objectively pointless? Yes, but if everything had to have a point, the world would be a much, much duller place.