Click for Larger Image

Story and photos by Jack Baruth

One must be careful using the Internet when one’s spouse is around, but I’d gotten careless, thinking my wife was asleep in the other room. At the sound of her footsteps, I whipped the mouse up to the upper-right-hand corner of the screen and minimized the Firefox page, but she’d already seen. I’d promised my habit would stop, called it a behavior that I could break any time, certainly not a problem, definitely not an addiction, but I’d been caught red-handed, misusing our ‘Net connection for my own perverse purposes. I started gibbering excuses. “Baby, I wasn’t really on that site. It was an old bookmark. A mistake. I didnt’ mean to…”

“You PROMISED!” she screamed. “NEVER AGAIN! YOU SAID YOU WOULD STOP LOOKING AT THAT STUFF! OPEN THE PAGE BACK UP! LET ME SEE THE FILTH YOU WERE SO EXCITED ABOUT!”

“Really, sweetheart,” I pleaded, “there’s no need. You’re better off not seeing…”

“LET ME SEE IT!” I clicked on the tab and there, spread across the page, was the evidence.

“Baby, I’m sorry, it was a one-time thing…”

“HOW COULD YOU! ISN’T OUR MARRIAGE WORTH ANY… oh, is that really the ‘Buy It Now’ price? That’s a ‘93 Silver Spur, which means it’s a 20,000 Series car, right?” It’s true: I’d promised Mrs. B that I would cut down on the time I spend searching eBay for Bentleys and Rolls-Royces, but as Peter Cetera once warned us, it’s a hard habit to break. I love those old Crewe-built unibody cars, from the original Silver Shadow and Bentley T1 all the way to the run-out Silver Dawns and Brooklands. The worst among them — think ‘76 Shadow with bad electrics and rust under the Everflex — can be had for ten grand, and that’s the most ill-advised ten grand you’ll ever spend. The cream of the crop — late Turbo RTs or the uber-rare Rolls-Royce Flying Spur Turbos — are seven or eight times that much. Chances are that you’ve looked at ‘em, too.

Our friends at Car and Driver once described the Rolls-Royce Silver Spur as “a really bad ’80s Town Car”, but that’s just a typical bit of C/D hyperbole meant to fill in the spaces between WeatherTech advertisements. The cars made at Crewe before Rolls-Royce and Bentley went their separate ways are part of an era which will never return; a time where there was always enough time, so to speak. The sheer number of man-hours which went into the construction of a 1985 Mulsanne would probably build ten new Continental GTs. The romance and reality of the old R-R/Bentley will never be equaled, and you can buy your own piece of the dream for less than it would take to get behind the wheel of a Prius. You know you want to do it, but you also have questions. How expensive will it be to run one of these big beasts? More importantly, does the experience really meet all of your expectations? Luckily for you, but unluckily for my marriage, we’ve learned the answers to those questions.

Click for Larger Image

My friend Aaron Greenberg, proprietor of MB Classic in Cinnncinati, Ohio and notorious ladies’ man of the Midwest, is one of those fellows who is virtually addicted to buying and selling unusual cars. In the past few years, he’s owned everything from a Series 1 Jaguar XJ6 to a Ferrari 360 Challenge Stradale, but he rarely keeps any of his cars for more than a month or two — so when I see his number on my mobile phone, I make sure to answer lest I miss out on the chance to drive something interesting. When the call came through this time, it was to let me know that he’d acquired an ‘89 Bentley Turbo R for… well, let’s call it “Prius money”, shall we? Better yet, he was willing to permit a bit of test thrashing. The things I do for you, dear readers! Let’s take the big Brit for a drive, shall we?

Click for Larger Image

Aaron’s Bentley is still a large car, even by the bloated standards of the 2008 luxury market. It’s both longer and heavier than a modern S-Class, and nearly as big as the current Flying Spur. Don’t expect a Spur’s worth of interior room, however; the Turbo’s packaging dates all the way back to the introduction of the Silver Shadow in 1965, which means plenty of shoulder room, thanks to the lack of “tumblehome” in the greenhouse, but a relatively cramped cockpit, because forty years ago your average British aristocrat was considerably smaller than your humble six-foot-two, two-hundred-and-twenty-five-pound author. The ignition cylinder is mounted high on the dashboard, to the left of the steering wheel, and, like the rest of the car, is clearly marked in plain English. If you want international icons for cruise control, headlight operation, or even the defroster, then perhaps you would be better-suited to a Maybach. This is a Bentley, and we use the Queen’s English here.

With a quick twist of the key, the Turbo fires up, and it is time to select a gear. Later Bentleys had overtly sporting console-mount shifters, but this is an early model and therefore shares a zero-effort electro-hydraulic column selector with the Rolls-Royce Silver Spirit. Two decades’ worth of innovation in electronic controls has taken the wonder out of this particular device, but prospective customers in 1989 would have been amazed at the effortlessness with it operated. The seating position can best be described as “throne-like”, the combination of high seat and low beltline not entirely unlike that of a first-generation Range Rover. In a country mostly without SUVs and pickups, such as Cold-War-era Britain, the Bentley driver would find himself looking down on virtually all traffic, literally and figuratively.

Click for Larger Image

The traditional distinction between Bentley and Rolls-Royce — namely, that one drives a Bentley but is driven in a Rolls-Royce — was probably responsible for the fact that the Turbo was introduced as a short-wheelbase model only, sharing a bodyshell with the Rolls-Royce Silver Spirit. A long-wheelbase model appeared later, but the SWB car still outsold it almost four to one until the Turbo received major revision in 1995, at which point the longer car gained momentum and became the customer favorite. Our tester is the short-wheelbase model, but it’s still far from nimble. The long hood, which has a flat winged-B emblem on the rounded, body-color grille, seems to stretch to the horizon. Once underway, the controls prove to be distant but trustworthy, enabling the driver to accurately place the big car within the lane or around a sharp corner. Aaron’s replaced the original Avon Turbospeeds with Goodyear Eagle LS tires, but the Bentley is certainly no autocross star. Once the Turbo takes a “set” in a corner, it’s reluctant to change course, and the combination of tall sidewalls and more than five thousand pounds in dry weight works effectively to damp one’s desire to toss it around.

Which, of course, would be beside the point. The purpose of a Bentley Turbo is to cover ground rapidly in complete comfort, and if the performance obtained by approximately three hundred and fifty horsepower working against the aforementioned two-and-a-half-ton-plus weight no longer startles us as it did the journalists of the day, it’s still more than adequate. The tried-and-true General Motors three-speed automatic is eager to select top gear at the earliest opportunity, but a right-foot call to the boiler room still produces a solid shove in the back, gathering speed in a strong, linear fashion. Our test car recorded an indicated one hundred and thirty miles per hour on the day of our test, and if that isn’t quite Veyron velocity, rest assured that it is far beyond what one would manage in a Silver Spur. This is a motorcar perfectly at peace with its mission in life.

Click for Larger Image

Perhaps the most satisfying aspect of the Turbo R is its unrelenting authenticity. After eighteen years of Lexus advertisements, most of us associate “luxury” with a sort of artificial, anesthetized, cotton-balls-in-the-ears quiet, but the Bentley is, by contrast, a bit noisy. The engine is not loud, but there’s a constant low-key symphony of machinery in the car, much of it related to the whirring and clicking of the delightful two-level HVAC system. “Lot of potentially expensive stuff going on behind that dash,” the Berg comments, and he’s right, but surely the pleasure of having hot feet and a cold breeze in the face, or the reverse, makes the potential for repair worthwhile. The “organ-stop” dashboard vent controls work just as one would expect, slamming home with the kind of mechanical solidity which simply doesn’t exist in a mere “luxury car”. A massive polished plate in the doorjamb announces that this is a BENTLEY, PRODUCT OF CREWE. The polished-wood door caps have three separate types of wood cut into a flawless veneer pattern. The dashboard is leather, but the stitching is deliberately hidden where a modern car would flaunt its seams. There’s no reason to show off the leather dash; a Bentley customer assumes that his motorcar possesses the finest possible dashboard trim and does not need to demonstrate it to others with exposed stitching. Everywhere you look, there’s authentic, hand-built excellence. The modern Flying Spur makes a solid attempt at recreating the traditional Bentley interior, but there’s a difference between imitation and reality. This is the real thing.

Click for Larger Image

So here we are, behind the wheel of an authentic leather-lined, wood-trimmed, turbo-powered British gentleman’s motorcar, purchased for Prius money. What’s the catch? There isn’t any, as long as you understand that it will never be cheap to maintain or operate a Bentley. It’s that simple. At the moment, Aaron’s Bentley requires (we never say “needs” when we’re talking about a Bentley; we say “requires”) four new brake discs. For our Neon race car, a set of Brembo replacement discs costs approximately $150, but the Bentley discs sell for slightly over six hundred dollars. Each. As this particular Turbo R has covered slightly over one hundred thousand miles, new suspension bushings are also required; figure that’ll run well over a grand. Smaller components, such as power window switches or HVAC components, are both difficult to source and outrageously expensive when they can be found. Do we even need to discuss how much the Byzantine electro-hydraulic transmission selector would cost to service or replace? Potential budget-Bentley owners would also be well-advised not to crash their motorcar, as the body panel, labor, and paint costs are quite likely to reflect the Turbo’s original cost of over one hundred and sixty-five thousand dollars. It’s very easy to sit around for a few moments and envision an annual operating budget well into the low five figures, and that’s before one takes into account the fuel “economy”, which would shame a big-block Suburban.

These relatively prosaic concerns all seem to fade away from the moment one points the winged “B” into traffic, which parts before the Turbo R as sheep do before a raging mountain lion. There’s simply no feeling in the world to compare with the sensation of operating a proper, handbuilt English motorcar. This car would dignify the most miserable of miscreants, which is no doubt why rappers and professional athletes are so anxious to be seen behind the wheel of the modern Continental GT and Flying Spur. As nice as those modern Phaetons-in-Bentley-costumes are, however, they aren’t the real thing. This Turbo R is the real thing — but as wonderful as it may be to drive, and as affordable as it can be to purchase, it won’t be cheap to run. If you can live with that, then you might want to emulate the Berg and adopt a Bentley of your very own. You’re unlikely to be disappointed.