What looks at first like a trick of the eye is actually four expressions of one of the most recognisable cars in Bentley history, each at a different scale. The original 1929 4½ Litre Supercharged Team Car No. 2, from the Bentley Heritage Collection, has been joined at the company’s Crewe campus by the fully electric, road-legal Blower Jnr from Hedley Studios and by two scale models from the Amalgam Collection: a race-weathered 1:8 edition and a brand new 1:18 replica, the most technically accomplished model Amalgam has produced at that scale.
The gathering marks twin milestones. The first 25 Blower Jnrs have now been completed at the Hedley Studios atelier in Bicester and are ready for customer delivery, and the very first of them is Bentley’s own, delivered to Crewe as a permanent member of the company’s fleet. Amalgam, meanwhile, has released its new 1:18 scale Blower alongside the larger 1:8 version first released in February 2020.
The Blower Jnr is an 85 per cent scale, fully electric recreation of the 1929 Team Car No. 2, revealed in 2023 as a collaboration between Bentley and The Little Car Company, now known as Hedley Studios. It is the first fully road-legal car from the studio, producing 31 bhp (23 kW) with an estimated top speed of more than 50 mph (80 km/h) and an expected range of up to 75 miles (120 km). Achieving road-legal status required extensive homologation work, with modern safety systems, lighting, sensors and electrical architecture integrated invisibly to preserve the character and analogue driving experience of the original.
“The hardest part of recreating a 1929 Bentley is everything you can’t see,” says Ben Hedley, founder of Hedley Studios. “We wanted Blower Jnr to preserve the character and analogue experience of the original, while also being a genuinely usable modern road vehicle. That meant engineering everything from headlights, indicators and braking systems to the electrical architecture and even a reversing camera, so that the modern technology effectively disappears into the car. Doing that as a fully homologated production vehicle for a run of just 349 cars has been an enormous undertaking.”
Hedley describes the Blower Jnr as the first recreation of a pre-war car design to be homologated as a newly manufactured production road vehicle, following a programme of tens of thousands of kilometres of test driving, endurance running and lab-based certification work.
The Amalgam Blower models are developed using CAD data from a 2025 digital scan of the Heritage Collection’s Team Car No. 2, combined with hundreds of photographs, precise measurements and paint references. Owners of Bentley’s Blower Continuation Series can commission a model at either 1:8 or 1:18 scale specified to match their own car.
“Having already developed the Bentley Blower in 1:8 scale, we knew just how complex this car is,” says Sandy Copeman, founder of Amalgam Collection. “The challenge was taking all that exposed mechanical detail and engineering and recreating it faithfully at one-eighteenth of the real size. Achieving that level of complexity in 1:18 scale demanded extraordinary precision from our team, and the result is what we believe to be the finest, most complex and technically accomplished 1:18 scale model we have ever produced.”
The 1:8 scale range also includes a race-weathered edition, limited to just 30 examples, which recreates Team Car No. 2 as it looked after completing the 1930 24 Hours of Le Mans. Amalgam’s artisans apply the dirt and battle scars of the race by hand, including the car’s famously bent rear fenders, damaged by tyre failures during the race and left unrepaired as proof of its hard-fought history.
The full-scale Team Car No. 2 remains an active member of the Bentley Heritage Collection. One of four Team Blowers built for competition and registered UU 5872, it raced at Le Mans in 1930 and still carries the spirit of the Bentley Boys and Girls. Nearly a century later, in sizes ranging from one-eighteenth to full scale, the Blower is still collecting new chapters.
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