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Black Country student makes classic car out of Lego

A love of Lego has helped inspire a Black Country teenager to create a British motoring classic.

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Ben Croot has built a Lego model of the Bentley "Blower", which competed in motor racing between 1927 and 1931

Ben Croot has spent the last eight months designing and building a replica of the Bentley “Blower”, which competed in motor racing between 1927 and 1931.

The model, which is 40cm long and 15cm wide, is made up of a mixture of Lego and Lego Technic pieces and has a working steering function which mimics the real mechanism on the car.

The 18-year-old, from Compton in Wolverhampton, said he had always had an interest in Lego from an early age.

He said: “I was always building robots and spaceships and things like that when I was younger and that’s where my interest around building things came from. I’m going on to study architecture and I’m really interested in the building of cars.”

Ben spent a lot of time getting all the details right, including work on the engine area

Ben, a former St Peter’s Collegiate School pupil, said he had chosen the Blower as it was British and an old, classic car and had been created from a mixture of Lego kits he had owned over the years.

Ben also said he had been looking to build the car to make it look as realistic as possible when compared to the original car.

He said: “I’m really interested in automotive design and how the other functions can be realistically portrayed in this model.

"After going through a number of different stages, rebuilding the chassis and the small designs on the engine, I’ve got it to how I wanted it to look, then spray painted it.”

Ben, who is looking to study architecture at Bath University, has also entered his model as a product idea for Lego Ideas, where any product idea getting 10,000 votes will be considered as a Lego product.

He has asked for members of the public to vote for his model and has more than 4,000 votes so far.

Vote at ideas.lego.com/projects/8af0fc1a-d44e-4cfd-a5eb-0391d8a86553