Bentley’s Next Continuation Car Could Be An R-Type Continental

Bentley let a handful of journalists loose in the first of its $2.5 million Blower Continuation cars last week. Just 12 will be built by the Classics team at Bentley’s Mulliner division over the next year or so using data gathered by disassembling the company’s priceless ‘Team Blower’ No2 and digitally scanning every single component.

The result is such an accurate reproduction that Bentley even asked the 12 lucky buyers whether they wanted pristine new floorboards, or ones that, like the No2 car, echoed the wear marks left by Sir Henry ‘Tim’ Birkin when he raced it at Le Mans in 1930.

But although the 12 Blower buyers have yet to take delivery of their cars, Bentley’s Classics crew is already scouting around for its next project. And Mulliner’s Omar Sheikh told Carscoops Bentley is considering jumping forward two decades to build a run of 1952-55 R-Type Continentals.

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Probably Bentley’s most desirable post-war performance car in the classic world, the R-type Continental is the inspiration for the modern Continental GT line that dates back to 2003, and was also James Bond’s choice of wheels in the original Thunderball novel published in 1961.

But the story starts a decade before Bond had grabbed his own set of keys. Back in the early 1950s, before it had been brought in-house, Mulliner was contracted to design a very special version of Bentley’s R-type. To slash weight, the panels, window frames and seat frames were all made from aluminum, and the body shape was crafted with the help of the wind tunnel operated by the aircraft division of Bentley’s then-parent company, Rolls Royce.

The 4.6-liter (later, 4.9) straight-six gained a compression ratio boost and carburation changes before longer gearing was fitted to maximize the R-Type Conti’s intercontinental cruising ability. A top speed of around 120 mph (193 km/h) was pretty spectacular for a four-seat car in 1952.

Bentley only built 208 examples, including the original prototype, and they’re now worth big money. The car pictured here, originally owned by Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onasis, was sold for $1.21 million back in 2015 by RM Sotheby’s, which went on to sell a similar example for $1.87 million the following year.

Though Sheikh says it’s still early days to be talking about the project that will come after the Blower, what’s clear is that the next car won’t be jumping on the classic EV bandwagon – although he didn’t rule out the possibility of that happening in the future.

“I don’t think we’ll put an electric powertrain in classic, not at this stage anyway” he told us. “We’ll still keep true to the authenticity of the original cars.”