Project Bentley Turbo R
Throwing caution to the wind, we buy our latest project car sight-unseen, and it really is a huge risk. Meet the Bentley!
Over the years, every bit of advice I’ve ever given in print or received from a specialist concerning the RollsRoyce Silver Spirit and its Bentley Mulsanne sibling is that in order to avoid a potential money pit of nightmarish proportions, it is essential to have a professional assessment before purchase. These cars may appear conventional in many ways, but Crewe very much ploughed their own furrow when it came to the engineering detail. And, of course, it’s the hidden faults which will trip you up financially and which mean that the modest cost of a specialist inspection can often be repaid several times over if it directs you to the right car.
All sensible stuff of course, which is why quite naturally we threw caution to the wind when acquiring our Bentley Turbo R project car during the most recent lockdown and bought the car unseen on the basis of photographs and its low mileage of just 47,000. That may sound totally daft (and it may yet turn out to be just that!), but there was some method in our madness. After all, there’s little point in running a pristine Turbo R for a magazine project because the car would provide very little to write about, yet an example with low mileage should in theory avoid some of the really costly issues these cars can suffer from. Besides, we’d already looked at enough examples to know where the bodywork issues are normally lurking, and this one looked to be in far better shape than any of the others at a similar price level. And finally, if all else failed and we came a cropper, we always had that old magazine stand-by to fall back on: ‘It’s all good copy!’ [Did it also help that you were gambling with the publisher’s money rather than your own...? Ed]
And so it was that a deal was done with the Bentley’s vendor which meant that early one morning I found myself in our company car park trying to coax our
Mk3 Escort 1.3GL former project car into life, the Ford having been accepted in part exchange. The Escort had sat unused for a few months and it took a good 30 minutes to get it running, at which point we discovered that the previous driver had rather unhelpfully left the handbrake on. The office kettle was swiftly deployed, a slug of boiling water over the drums producing a satisfying ‘ping’ a few seconds later as the shoes released, just in the nick of time as the Bentley promptly arrived.
First impressions were broadly good, although the fact that its hefty 2.5-tonne bulk meant it wouldn’t fit on the delivery transporter meant it had arrived under its own power, and as a result, winter road dirt was obscuring the true condition of the Cobalt Blue paintwork. Poking round the car in person revealed what we’d hoped to find though – a basically honest car which would benefit from some tidying.
It was not perfect, of course, as we’d only paid £9500 for the beast. For one thing, in a vain attempt to reduce the car’s weight, Rolls- Royce used aluminium door, boot and bonnet panels which do tend to suffer from reactive corrosion, and there’s some evidence of this around a couple of the door handles on our car, while the paint has flaked off the boot lid – a common issue, and one easily camouflaged by an oversize rear plate.
Elsewhere, the front wings show some bubbling at their lower corners, and there’s a nasty scab under the offside lower corner of the rear screen which will need professional attention, but as far as obvious rust goes, that’s about it. Inside, the car is clean and complete, with the piped Parchment leather crying out for a clean and recolour but the ‘highly figured wood’ (that’s what it says on the options list) looking suitably lustrous.
One thing we just couldn’t look past though was the tyres. It was wearing a chunky set of Pirelli Scorpions, which are 4x4 tyres more suited to a Shogun than a Bentley or a Rolls. Tyres are a perennial problem with these cars, essentially since there’s no other vehicle on the planet which runs a 15in rim, can crack 140mph and weighs 2.5 tonnes. The result of this is that there’s just one tyre choice – the Avon CR27 which was developed especially for the Turbo R back in the day. That would be fine as Avon are a good make, but these things are expensive, generally retailing for anywhere between £300 and £400 a corner, with the added curve ball that Avon only makes them in small batches. Indeed, at the time of writing many of the specialist tyre suppliers were unable to supply them at all, although thankfully project sponsor Flying Spares came to the rescue with a set of four which arrived the next day.
Our initial plan on delivery day had been
to film a quick video for our Classics World YouTube channel and head round the M25 to Isleworth, where respected Rolls- Royce and Bentley specialist Nigel Sandell had volunteered to take a look at the car for us and provide an initial assessment. Yes, yes, I know, stable door, horse and all that...
After pausing only to adjust the Bentley’s boot lock so that it actually closed and we weren’t in danger of scattering cameras across the motorway, we set out full of optimism. Initial driving impressions were good, too: the car drove straight, wasn’t making any alarming smells or sounds and after a mile at the wheel I was feeling confident that we’d bought a good one. Sadly, another mile down the road and I wasn’t so sure!
Waiting at a steep junction, I’d assumed the burning smell wafting through the vents was the driver in front struggling with a hill start, but when I glanced down and saw the Bentley’s charge warning light glowing, I realised I was very wrong. I pulled over into a layby and one look under the bonnet revealed the cause – the V8 had thrown its alternator belt, the shredded state of which explained the burning smell.
Stumped for ideas, we called a colleague with local knowledge, who advised us that we were a stone’s throw from a general garage workshop. So, trusting the battery to get us that far, we duly found the place and blocked most of his forecourt with the 5.5m-long Bentley.
The proprietor was helpful enough and reckoned that if his supplier could source a belt, he’d be happy to fit it for us while we waited, but my confidence rather evaporated when he asked me what kind of car it was. By this point we already knew how the day would play out, and sure enough a Bentley alternator belt couldn’t be acquired that day. This left us with a tricky decision: we couldn’t leave the car blocking the man’s business, so did we call for recovery or try to make it the two miles back to base on the battery?
Naturally, we decided to take the gamble and I’m still convinced the car would have made it had we not been unlucky enough for the level crossing gates on the route to be down. I’d already turned off all the electrical kit, from radio to air con, but did I risk a long period of idling or switch the engine off and hope the battery had enough amps to restart? And what if there were two trains? Mentally tossing a coin, I switched off, but sure enough, when the barriers lifted there was nothing but a distant click from the starter solenoid.
With the car blocking the narrow road, colleague Joe was forced to jump out and direct traffic, while I made the call of shame. At which point I was told that
because of high demand in that particular corner of Kent, I might have to wait a staggering seven hours. By this time, Joe had spotted what looked like a car park down a slight incline, so jumping into another gamble I waited for a gap in the traffic, slipped the Bentley into neutral and admired just how quickly 2.5 tonnes gathers speed downhill. We got lucky and the car petered out of momentum in what turned out to be a country park, needing only a last bit of assistance from those blokes who always appear out of nowhere when a car needs a push.
To cut a long story short, the recovery firm called me later that evening, by which time I was already back home 120 miles away and the local council had rather usefully locked the Bentley up securely inside the car park. Local specialist Peter Sharman of Shadow Motor Cars obliged by recovering the Bentley next morning, and the same day he had it back in our office car park with a new alternator belt fitted, plus a new battery to replace the timeexpired and under-specified item it had arrived with. Great service from them most certainly, but not an auspicious start for our new Project Gamble!
A few weeks later, I returned to the office to collect it and pausing only to stow a spare alternator belt and 17mm spanner in the boot, I enjoyed a trouble-free run back home to Gloucestershire. By that time, Flying Spares had delivered the set of new Avons and a priority was to have them fitted, a job which was duly carried out by my local garage where the boss is an enthusiastic Arnage owner.
Driving the car on the proper tyres for the first time, I was amazed at the transformation. It’s no exaggeration to say that I’ve never before experienced such a change in a car from a simple change of tyres. The road noise from the chunky offroad tread was gone, leaving the Bentley as refined as you’d expect, while directional stability was much improved. So it was a real shame when, after manoeuvring out of the garage, the ABS light came on. Since then it’s generally been intermittent in its behaviour but seemingly triggered by turning the wheels to full lock, so we’ll need to get a specialist with the correct tester to take a look.
That apart, the car was driving really very well. The road tests of the day praised the big car’s uncanny agility, and the proper tyres gave it the poise that had so impressed them. This was the era when Rolls- Royce famously declined to quote an exact power figure, describing it merely as ‘adequate,’ but thanks to the German market, we know that our injected 1990-spec car puts out 320bhp. That might sound lacklustre for a 6.75-litre engine, but it’s backed up with a rather more impressive 455lb.ft of torque at just 2400rpm, and it’s this mighty lowspeed twist action which gives the car its unlikely pace. The big V8 is red lined at just 4500rpm and it’s truly a lazy way to travel fast, rarely needing more than a gentle
squeeze of the throttle to see the prow lift almost imperceptibly and following traffic to shrink in the mirror, all the while without causing your passengers to look up from doom scrolling their iPhones.
Being a 1990-spec car, our
Turbo R also features the Automatic Ride Control suspension, using an ECU which measures the road speed alongside the steering speed, throttle pedal angle, brake lights and three accelerometers. That information is then used to adjust solenoids on the front dampers and valve assemblies on the rear dampers, which vary the amount of oil being allowed to bypass the damping piston in three modes: normal, comfort and firm.
There’s no dashboard control, the system being designed to operate automatically and although it may be low-tech compared to modern electronic adaptive damping set-ups, it works incredibly well – which is to say it’s entirely unobtrusive, which is as it should be. At low speeds, the big Bentley soaks up broken urban surfaces, while at higher speeds on a flowing A-road the body roll is much reduced, and it’s this which gives the big Bentley capabilities far beyond the confidence of most drivers, me included. I’ve given it a few exploratory tries on favourite local roads and come to the conclusion that the average driver is going to back off long before the car’s limits are reached. At least, that is, in the dry. At the time of writing, I’ve yet to experience it in the wet...
Meanwhile, a thorough session with bucket and sponge saw the Bentley looking good, with the proper tyres transforming its appearance nicely too. The first stage in our project will be to get it to Nigel Sandell as originally planned, and with an expert’s assessment of the car we can start to compile our to- do list.