Buying Guide Bentley Turbo R
Few cars offer as much luxury and performance for your money as a Turbo R, but buying on a whim can land you in hot financial water. So how do you find a good one?
‘It had both more power and more sporting driving characteristics’
Prior to the Turbo R, many had begun to question why Rolls-Royce even bothered producing Bentley models; the marque had become a purveyor of lightly re-styled Rollers that sold in small numbers. Suffice to say that no-one questioned the validity of the flying ‘B’ once this two-ton bruiser had left its mark.
The Turbo R’s roots were straight from the badge-engineering playbook, however. The Mulsanne (upon which it is based) made its debut in 1980 alongside its Silver Spirit twin. In 1982, however, Bentley decided to tackle poor Mulsanne sales by bolting a Garrett turbocharger to its 6.75-litre engine to create the Mulsanne Turbo, and following that car’s strong reception, decided to create an altogether different car from its Rolls-Royce genesis – the Turbo R – in 1985. The ‘R’ stood for ‘roadholding’ and Bentley now had a car that enjoyed both more power and greater sporting driving characteristics than anything Rolls could muster. It revived Bentley’s fortunes, eventually seeing the marque outsell RollsRoyce, something that it had never done before.
Updates in 1987 made the car unequivocally better, with fuel injection and ABS, while 1990 tweaks added more advanced (and more complex) adaptive suspension. 1991 saw the GM sourced three-speed swapped for a four-speeder and from here on changes were only detail – though special versions abounded throughout the Nineties. So too, buyers could choose from short or long wheelbase models throughout all but the final year of production.
Today, even after some increase in values, they are still an awful lot of car for the money, but anyone without five-digit wealth reserves should choose their car carefully. Though never cheap to run, outwardly identical Turbo Rs can range from a slightly expensive hobby to a wretched money pit. Here’s how to choose wisely.