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Before Formula One and Ferrari, Red Bull and multimillion-pound endorsement deals, there were the Bentley Boys. In 1923, the inaugural 24 Hours of Le Mans kicked off a spectacle that would become one of the greatest races on the motoring calendar. Manufacturers would soon sign up their factory teams to compete in the French countryside. By 1931, Alfa Romeo, Mercedes-Benz, Aston Martin and Bugatti were on the grid. But throughout the 1920s, it was all about Bentley, which won five out of the first eight races. A gallivanting group of aristocrats, adventurers and war heroes – among them the likes of Frank Clement, John Duff, Woolf Barnato and Tim Birkin – were responsible for much of Bentley’s early motor-racing success.
When they weren’t pulling all-nighters in London’s Grosvenor Square, they were obsessed with winning. Sir Henry Ralph Stanley Birkin, 3rd Baronet, was the most inventive. By 1928, halfway through a run of four consecutive Bentley victories, he came up with the idea of supercharging his 4.5-litre car. The resulting Bentley Blower became one of the most famous Bentleys ever made. It’s also, nearly a century later, Petersen Engineering’s bestselling car.
Based in a small town in Devon, Petersen has become the main destination for vintage Bentley enthusiasts. Founded by Bob Petersen and his wife Sally in 1988 as a coachbuilder and restorers, the company continues the work Birkin and WO Bentley were doing in the ’20s and ’30s. Each car is built to order, starting with a donor chassis before everything is completely overhauled. Petersen’s own archive contains many period-correct parts, but new elements are often dreamt up and manufactured from scratch. Everything, from the Connolly leather seats to the dashboards, pistons and nuts and bolts are assembled in its Devon workshops.
Looking at a Petersen car, you might think it’s taken a lifelong dedication to Bentley to get to this point. The company was in fact founded by chance. Bob trained as a graphic designer, but his passion for tinkering was impossible to quash. The first vehicle he worked on was a double-decker London bus. His next was an old Bentley. “A local guy used to drive a vintage Bentley to the pub, but he could never get it home again as it would always break down,” says his son Jesse. “So my old man suggested he could make it more reliable by just modernising a few things. This was in the early ’80s, and he restored this guy’s Bentley just off the cuff. He then fell in love with Bentley, having not known a great deal about them before.”
Things built quickly from there and, deciding to pursue it full-time, Bob and Sally moved from High Wycombe to Devon. The majority of work is still completed on site where they live but, having expanded, Petersen now has workshops and storage in a nearby industrial estate. Bob, 70, is still heavily involved, but Jesse is now slowly taking over the reins. “In the beginning, it was just Dad on his own,” says Jesse. “Now we’ve got 16 guys that work for us full-time. Dad realises he isn’t getting any younger, but he’s still majorly in charge of things. My sister and I are partners in the business, and she does all the upholstery herself.”
Petersen has built more than 100 cars to date, with the current output being, at best, six cars a year. “We’ve had some that we’ve dragged out of orchards, and one that we pulled out of a lake in America,” says Jesse. Each one takes between 18 months and two and a half years to build, with prices starting at £350,000 and rising to £600,000 depending on the model and customisations requested. Each one is made to the client’s specifications, and nearly anything is possible – we’ve built a Mercedes ‘Trossi’ replica on a Bentley chassis before.”
In 1930 Woolf Barnato raced a train across Europe in a Bentley, which became known as the Blue Train car. “We’ve done six of those, one being supercharged.” Engines can be swapped around, and Petersen often uses later 1950s engines, which its engineers have fuel-injected to make them more reliable. And then there’s the Meteor-engined cars.
“It’s basically a Spitfire engine. Meteor engines are based on the Merlins and were used in tanks, but come without the supercharger. So we source them rather than the Spitfires, as those are about half a million just for the engine. We built one for a crazy customer up in Sunningdale. We’d already done a car for him and he said, ‘What about sticking a Meteor engine in?’ A few people had done these Meteor cars before, but this guy wanted a Bentley Blower replica with the 27-litre Meteor engine. We managed to shoehorn the engine in there somehow. It took about four years to build. After we finished the build, Top Gear found out about it and did a big show on it. Chris Evans went on to own that car. He bought that after the show and then sold it to Jay Leno.”
What about other requests? Anything particularly weird? “We’ve had a few, but nothing too dodgy. Some people want to be able to pull the carpet up and have a little lock box in there. They keep their passports in it and things like that. We built a car that went to Mexico. It was a long project that went on two years longer than it should have because everything was just a nightmare. It had electric doors, electric windows and air conditioning. He wanted albino-alligator door cards and little accents inside the car. We said, ‘You can have brown leather.’ I draw the line at alligator.”
Around 90 per cent of what Petersen builds are Bentley Blower “Specials”. Seeing a Petersen 4.5-litre Blower alongside a Birkin original from the ’20s, you’d be hard-pressed to tell them apart. But look very closely and you’ll spot a few differences. Most Petersen cars are specced with modern disc brakes, which are hidden under covers that look like original drums. Dissect the 4.5-litre, six-cylinder “R”-type engines and you’ll discover Petersen-designed camshafts, pistons, flywheels, crankshafts and heavy-duty clutches, all upgrades on the original parts. The interiors are practically luxurious. “We’ve got USBs underneath the dashboard and phone chargers,” says Jesse. “The majority of our cars now have heated seats.”
What are they like to drive? “It’s the purest form of motoring there is. You’ve got no windscreen or protection like with a normal convertible, so you’re out in the elements. You’ve got the noise, which is phenomenal. And the best bit about it is all the happy faces you see. It brings a smile to someone’s face. If you drive a Ferrari, people don’t let you out at a junction. You drive something like this, they wave you out.”