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4½ Litre Supercharged

4½ Litre Supercharged
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Wikipedia: Bentley 4½ Litre Page Sections History Images

An early sports car produced by Bentley.  The car was a supercharged version of the 4½ Litre Bentley, and known most popularly as the "Blower Bentley."

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History

The following section is an excerpt from Wikipedia's Bentley 4½ Litre page on 26 July 2016, text available via the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

The Bentley 4½ Litre was a British car based on a rolling chassis built by Bentley Motors. Walter Owen Bentley replaced the Bentley 3 Litre with a more powerful car by increasing its engine displacement to 4.4 L (270 cu in).

Bentley buyers used their cars for personal transport and arranged for their new chassis to be fitted with various body styles, mostly saloons or tourers. However, the publicity brought by their competition programme was invaluable for marketing Bentley's cars.

At the time, noted car manufacturers like Bugatti and Lorraine-Dietrich focused on designing cars to compete in the 24 Hours of Le Mans, a popular automotive endurance course established only a few years earlier. A victory in this competition quickly elevated any car maker's reputation.

A total of 720 4½ Litre cars were produced between 1927 and 1931, including 55 cars with a supercharged engine popularly known as the Blower Bentley. A 4½ Litre Bentley won the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1928. Though the supercharged 4½ Litre Bentley's competitive performance was not outstanding, it set several speed records, most famously in 1932 at Brooklands with a recorded speed of 222.03 km/h (138 mph).

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Images

	1929 Photo by Joe Cheng Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts June 29, 2005 View photo of 1929 Bentley 4½ Litre Supercharged - 105KB This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License.
	Bentley 4.5 Litre Blower Artist: Hendrik Mueller Cars: 1930 Bentley 4½ Litre Supercharged Image courtesy View "Bentley 4.5 Litre Blower" - 1930 Bentley 4½ Litre Supercharged - 218KB
	Bentley Dashboard Artist: Hendrik Mueller Cars: 1930 Bentley 4½ Litre Supercharged Image courtesy View "Bentley Dashboard" - 1930 Bentley 4½ Litre Supercharged - 124KB

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