Originally a 1906 Darracq Grand Prix car which Louis Wagner drove in the very first 1906 Grand Prix, run over two days on a long road course near Le Mans.  The following year Wagner won the Vanderbilt Cup on Long Island in this same car.

The big 4-cylinder 14.25 liter engine is said to have been enlarged when Malcolm Campbell bought the car in 1910.  It was his first Blue Bird.  One night he had been to see Maeterlinck’s ‘Blue Bird’ play on stage in London and went home to paint his new car for the Brooklands race the following day.  

"He spent much of the night smothering the car and himself in blue paint.  He drove it to Brooklands with the paint still wet and glistening, and when he got out, so much had attached itself to his person that he looked more like a blue bird than the car."