Bentley Arnage R
BENTLEY BRINGS A RICH LIFE EXPERIENCE
Imagine this. You go to a Mercedes dealership and hand over ١61,000 for an S Class 350 long wheelbase.
You drive it to the bank, where you take out £5,000 (it can be all in £50 notes in view of what you are about to do).
Next, you find a scrapyard with a car crusher. You put the £5,000 in the Mercedes, set fire to the money, and then get the guys to crush the car as the money burns.
Sound mad? Well, spare a thought for anyone who bought a Bentley Arnage R this time last year because what they lost between list price then and trade value now amounts to doing the same.
But, in the process, the Bentley driver would have been having great fun driving a British institution. If I had the money, I would do it (buy the Bentley, that is, not crush the Mercedes). Its reckoned that Arnage buyers have a net worth of £10 million or so, which means they can afford the drop.
In fact sales of luxury Bentleys are surging ahead, not just here but across the world. They are driven by the Continental GT coupe, convertible, and Flying Spur saloon with the Arnage suitable for those who are more than just new money types.
As the guy brought the Bentley Arnage test car off the delivery truck and slid to a halt beside me, all I could hear was the light tapping of the valve gear in its superb 6.75 litre V8 engine.
It brought memories flooding back of my first drive in an automatic car, a Bentley SIII, in 1973; my first test in a Rolls-Royce, a Silver Shadow II in 1979; and various other Bentley and Rolls excursions since, all of them using that engine apart from the Bentley Continental GT coupe, which uses a Volkswagen W12, and an old Bentley R Type Continental which had a six cylinder engine.
The V8 is 50 years old in 2009 and Bentley has been making cars for 61 years at its current base in Crewe, so theres an anniversary not yet achieved and another Ive missed. Im celebrating them both in the middle and having a ball. The car was also taking Verity to the ceremony on her wedding day, but it didnt outshine her. It outshone everything else it came into contact with, though.
Bentley motoring Arnage-style is about much more than driving a car. This is about regal progress, about cars as they used to be before they all started to look the same, as people of my generation are often convinced they do.
You sit behind that football pitch of bonnet with the winged B above the traditional mesh grille helping you point in the right direction. Somehow, its less vulgar than a Mercedes gunsight. Then you either waft away or gun the slightly stiff throttle whichever, progress is serene. The horizon just reels in at different speeds accompanied by a muffled growl.
That V8 engine now has twin turbochargers and, in the Arnage R, pumps out about 450 bhp, vastly more than in the Rolls-Royce days of ownership when the output was coyly described as “sufficient”. The Arnage T manages 500 bhp.
Good news for green thinkers is that this behemoth of a car consumes less fuel than the old V8 models. I was getting up to 20 mpg when in days gone by 12 mpg was a bonus and 14 mpg equivalent to an economy run.
Above all, this £166,000 car oozes quality and style in a way that drivers of ordinary cars, without being snobbish, fail to understand. This is not so much a mode of transport as a life experience which even drivers of the Continental GT have probably yet to grasp.
Maurice Hardy
Annette’s View
Our friend Viv had a landmark birthday a week or two before the Bentley Arnage arrived, so we decided to pick her up from her Wiltshire home and whisk her up to Rodborough in the Cotswolds, where the Rolls-Royce of all English ice creams is made.
With her husband riding shotgun up front, both Viv and I, busy chatting in the back, realised that the delightful floating ride of the Bentley had suddenly got firmer. Seems he who thinks he knows best had decided to switch to the sport suspension setting to improve the drive but I think it should be left for the chauffeur to select when driving one-up in a hurry to fetch the master or mistress from an engagement.
People often ask if big cars like the Arnage are difficult to drive and, truthfully, they are not. Just three months after I passed my test, many moons ago, I was driving a Bentley Continental drophead of roughly the same proportions and had no trouble at all. What a week that was, too, for at the same time we also had an Aston Martin V8 and a Range Rover.
The Bentley experience is something to be savoured and before we drove our first Rolls-Royce test car we had to make the pilgrimage to Crewe so we would realise what they were all about. The Arnage is definitely made with the same loving care. Bentley may be part of VW these days, but the craftsmen are no less skilled or devoted.
Car: Bentley Arnage R
Does it fit your ego?…
0-62 mph: 5.8 secs
Top speed: 168 mph
Bhp: 450 @ 4100 rpm
Torque: 645 lb ft @ 1800 rpm
…and your wallet?…
Price: £166,000
Urban: 9.8 mpg
Extra urban: 20.1 mpg
Combined: 14.5 mpg
CO2 emissions: 465 g/km
Insurance Group: 20
Best bits: brings history to life; looks imposing; youre rich.