Bentley T2 and Turbo R - A Fond Farewell to the Big V8 | Tyrrell's Classic Workshop

hello and welcome to Toral's classic workshop in this video we're taking a bit of the Italian exotica which has become the norm and we're looking at some interesting cars which are very much close to my heart and part of my history personally but are also sort of coming back into vogue again after years of being in the doldrums that's the Bentley t2 and the turbo are the later version if you like the t2 is a surprisingly rare car rolls-royce and Bentley were one and the same in the 1970s and 80s really same company almost the same products slightly differences we'll see but the similarities between this and the rolls-royce Silver Shadow - were negligible you have the different grille this was actually not standard this flying be you've got the B badge on the headlights you got the Bentley instead of RR on the instruments and the same on the hubcaps the wheel trims that's it this particular t2 is quite a rare beast they made 558 only in total but the amazing thing is they made 8400 shadow twos so for everyone Bentley that was sold at the time there were 15 equivalent Rolls Royces coming off the production line Crewe had almost completely forgotten the Bentley brand which is shocking when you consider how strong it is these days in comparison so it was all but neglected these to me represented a high point in the sort of late 20th century rolls-royce and Bentley situation because they were really hand-built cars in every sense of the word I am being slightly biased because I started my working life working on these cars day in day out I've probably worked literally on hundreds of them I would say of the rolls-royce and Bentley Silver Shadow and t-series so they are quite close to my heart I've started life when I was 19 working in a rolls-royce and Bentley service centre but the t2 is potentially quite an interesting car to drive all through the 70s the the silver shadows and Bentley T types had a real reputation they were called Rollie pollies because the handling was so awful on them you sort of went into a corner and waited for the rest of the car to cut you up for really but things change with the t2 a little bit they got rack and pinion steering which is much more direct the early cars literally were like this you could do that driving down the road and it made no difference because the chief engineer a guy called Harry grills and had insisted on what he called the sneeze factor being built into the steering so you didn't go across a motorway if you suddenly sneezed bit of an exaggeration really as we know you ended up with very very steering even when it was in prime health these are a bit different they sharpened it up in 1969 they changed from Armstrong to Gerling shock absorbers and that was a big mistake because that was what gave the shadow and the t-series it's terrible reputation for handling because the Armstrong shock absorbers were great the girling ones were worn out after about 3,000 miles and the car started rolling and pitching and one thing and another in the 1980s I started fitting Harvey Bailey handling kits which friend am the guy who became a friend of mine Roddy Harvey Bailey invented a handling kit for these he was a very clever suspension engineer and he devised a handling kit for these cars different Springs different anti-roll bars and a set of decent quality Boger or Bilstein shock absorbers and it made the world of difference to these cars and with this kit fitted and at some decent shocks they really do handle they drive incredibly well I've had some interesting run-ins on a roads quite shocked people in 1980s driving xr3i escorts behind me in the rain and they couldn't understand why I was losing them round corners anyway a lifetime away from now but this particular car I've known since 1984 the second owner bought the car from Jack barclays in Berkeley Square in 1984 it's a 1979 car it still got the original number plates on from 1979 with the Jack Berkeley logo embossed on them it's never had a different number on and I service the car for him during the 1980s all the way through and I alternated with the service centre the rolls-royce service center which was in existence then the crew which serviced customers cars that's what people would send their cars almost from all over the world to the factory at Crewe now it's Bentley then it was rolls-royce and Bentley and they would service them do whatever repair them restore them and send them back again and I would do one service on this car and they would do another and vice versa I don't know who he was checking up on but one of us obviously ahem and it stamped in the book here it is you can see t'rul engineering from way back then rolls-royce service centre at Crewe and this is an original service but you can see it still got its full history of services and this lovely handbook going right back to when the car was in its prime really so I've had a bit of an issue with this car it's not been running too smoothly it needed a bit of a birthday it's got some very old fashioned su carburetors on its skinner Union s you stood for and they've been around for over a hundred years su the carburetors on this are called hif7 s horizontal integral float chamber and I'm going to tune these they're quite unusual in that you tuned the mixture rich by screwing the screw in and lean to unscrew the screw which is the opposite way to the way most carburetors work the only carburetors that work this way are some Hollies so I'm going to tune it up and then I'm going to take it for a run and hopefully it still handles really well [Music] well you should in theory be able to balance a coin on these when they're done so let's see yeah I'm not gonna risk it too long but it's there there abouts one of the interesting facets of this car is the engine the big v8 as it's come to be known a crew it first appeared in the rolls-royce Silver Cloud - which was in 1959 and 1960 and it was very much modeled on American v8 at the time in Detroit's they were coming up with thin wall casting technology for cast-iron cylinder blocks which a lot of engines went on to use that became sort of staple for Ford and GM at at Detroit but rolls-royce too chose another route they went with an alloy block and alloy heads so the whole engine is an alloy v8 but very much along similar principles to the the Detroit v8 they actually bought an automobile Toronado crew secretly to develop the v8 engine and possibly the concept as the Oldsmobile did of the the big high voce n-- the big chain drive front-wheel drive which they never went to but Rolls Royce originally conceived two models of the silver shadow tibet and burma they were codenamed tibet had a much longer front than this and because they experimented with a straight-8 engine instead of a v8 or even a v12 but they ended up using the v8 and the tibet was the longer one and then they realized that if they kept the car under 17 feet long it actually affected the price of the car quite drastically because the different shipping cars to the US in containers between a car that was under 17 feet long and over 17 feet was quite substantial and I believe for that reason they left the bumpers off them till they got to the US so that it kept the car under 17 feet long and that way obviously the import duties the shipping duties were less and it was cheaper for them to sell them in the States and the shadow in particular sold in their droves in the u.s. it had a magnificent record as a dollar earner for crew for the factory but so this car has got the v8 it's essentially very heavily modified but essentially still the same engine that's used today in the Mulsanne and it really has been a very very good engine they had some problems with it when it first came out in the Silver Cloud two camshafts wore prematurely and things like that they sorted all that out and provided you change the oil on these engines they're really really really reliable so what I'm gonna do I mean obviously she's running really smoothly I'm just warming it through I mean she is warm already really will take around the corner and give her a bit of a workout yeah as I mentioned earlier with the handling kit on and with the suspension really in good shape you can hustle these cars so that's what I'm going to do I'm just going to open her up give her a little hustle and a little bit of left foot braking through this Bend and we'll actually take the corner at far more speed than this car has any right to try doing that in a Silva shadow without a handling kit or any other goodies it just won't like it at all it's a it was a dream to be able to make these cars handle like that but handle it does and it makes it a really really fun car to drive who ever would have thought that again I've got another Bend coming up here so just a DAB on the brakes tiny dab through the band nice and level throttle power out and there she is takes the corner beautifully negligible roll quite incredible really same again even though it wasn't meant to be this could be almost a sports car if you use your imagination enough well here we are fast-forwarding now to 1994 that's the year of this car this is a Bentley Turbo R very interesting the way Bentley managed in a very short space of time to reinvent themselves and actually to overtake rolls-royce it's amazing the way fads and things change and the really big thing was the the Bentley Mulsanne turbo that's what changed things 1982 if we're not mistaken I'm sure people will correct me if I'm wrong and that the Mulsanne turbo came out it was mechanically very similar to the shadow to earlier a same engine just about different race suspension different type of brake fluid but other than that the floor pan and the underpinnings were very similar and the performance was very similar unsurprisingly but what crew did was bolt a garrett to4 turbocharger onto the engine at that time had a big carburetor a soul x4 a1 and the the whole thing worked extremely well it really did power was up 30% instantly to around about 300 brake horsepower doesn't sound a lot but it's the talk that's the big thing to worry about or mention bags of torque and they went like the wind and the acceleration for a car of that era and of that weight was sensational and what happened then in 1985 they brought out in another car called the Bentley Turbo R because the problem with the Mulsanne turbo was it went really well in a straight line soon as you got to the corners it was another Rollie pollie rolls-royce Bentley albeit with better dampers they actually had the sense to fit Boger dampers at Crewe from spirits generation onwards which actually carried on working which the gerlichs didn't so better car in some respects but the interesting thing is the Mulsanne turbo and the crew were very conservative in the way they did things generally speaking the drive line the brakes the suspension everything we're all the same as the previous Mulsanne the shadow to the Bentley - and they still considered them robust enough to accept the extra power and they did I mean the diffs you know nothing unsavory happened with the driveline particularly the diffs was still up - it breaks to a large extent were up to the performance etc that's a testament to crews build quality they got a lot of things wrong but they got a lot of things right - and the turbo R was just a great car and it was the first class to have alloy wheels from crew as well 1985 kamagra 5000 series Rolls Royce came out with alloy wheels just a little bit before that possibly and again the engineering department were worth terribly conservative and the styling department were on their case to incorporate alloy wheels in their cars and they just resisted it and those frumpy old steel wheels with pressed stainless steel hubcaps carried on for far too long really turbo R came of age in 1985 then it gained fuel injection which it desperately needed again because the engineers at Crewe limped on with a carburetor for far too long and abs in 1987 and it also developed the four round headlights instead of the rectangular ones at the silver spirit had this is a more powerful car turbo wires are a bit like wines you have good years and bad years so for example this is a good year because it's got the four-speed automatic gearbox and it's also got the xytec engine management system which took things to a whole new level really but 1991 turbo r's have got the full speed automatic gearbox but they were also the first cars to have a catalyst fitted and it really robbed them of power it just took the edge off the acceleration amazing really so 91 not the best year still a great car but 93 94 really really good car they altered the dashboard but these cars really go well and this particular car is a personal favorite of mine because it was owned by a pediatric surgeon a customer of mine in the early noughties I've been looking after it for about 15 years he passed away and I've still maintained that relationship with the car and it's had a running fault which was potentially difficult to find really badly running not pulling properly not picking up actually turned out to just be an induction pipe with a pin hole in it that needed replacing great I'm going to give this car a run now to make sure it's okay the are in turbo are is for Road holding so what crew did was actually up rate the suspension they went for stiffer dampers actually instead of stiffer springs and anti-roll bars which I've spoken to various very clever suspension people since and they said that sort of the wrong way to go because all the damper does is actually damped whatever springing you have there already and that's why on modern cars certainly in the early years of cars with switchable damping they weren't really a great success you either ended it with the harsh ride or a car that was quite wallowy because it's the springing that's the important bit not the shock absorbers the shock absorbers just dump whatever the springing is I'm sure I'll have lots of people saying no that's not the case but that's my experience talking over a beer or a pork pie or whatever with some very very clever suspension people anyway first majority of people wouldn't knoe wouldn't care it goes round corners it's a bit bumpy on the ride but still a great gray car actually and an important part it reinvented Bentley it brought them back into the frame brought them back into Fame and that's why the Bentley brand is as popular and as strong as it is let's give it a run one of the things that amazes me about these cars when I mentioned before about crew getting it wrong and I'm six feet but I'm quite long in the body and my head is touching the roof you know it amazes me that car manufacturers build such big cars and yet you know they're actually not big enough for a slightly larger person or you know that kind of thing it's it's just incredible for hilly that they start with a clean sheet and get it so wrong it probably helps if I recline the seat a bit more but even so you take my point and this car is obviously running better it's as smooth as you like now it's it's idling smoothly it's pulling nicely and the big v8 it's like the legendary American v8 they've been improved upon over the decades the small-block Chevy whatever else but they just they just keep reinventing them and you know they meet the emissions laws they meet all sorts of things and and this big v8 from Crewe is the same and the amount of power they eat out of it and still do is it's very very good and they went into over to just have been nerdy for a moment they went over to cross bolted main bearings in 1989 to improve the strength of the bottom and because they did suffer with feather'd main bearings but you know that's that's to be expected really it's just development yeah there's no doubt that fixing replacing that pipe has solved the induction early problem that it had so it's running really sweet and smooth now low down but I'm just gonna open it up and see if it's all there here we go yeah really really really quick and the brakes work as well always a bonus and again it does take the corn as well got to remember this cars two and a quarter tons and I can I can hustle it through the Benz quite remarkably really obviously things have moved on now we live in the age of buy turbo v12 Mercedes and all sorts of you know uber powerful saloon cars Tesla's developing huge power but there's still something really really visceral and satisfying about a big turbocharged v8 propelling you just magical and it is such big fun to hustle such a big car around you can you can chuck it around and if you really want to don't try this at home but you can actually get the back end out on it and just give it a bit of oversteer and opposite lock and whatever [Music] just great fun well that concludes another turell's classic workshop hope you've enjoyed it and we'll be back soon you

Channel: Tyrrell's Classic Workshop

Views: 166,380

Rating: 4.9837003 out of 5

Keywords: Iain Tyrrell, Tyrrell's Classic Workshop, Classic Car Expert, Classic Car Restoration, Classic Car Insights, Classic Cars Cheshire, Bentley, T2, Turbo R, 6.5 Litre V8, Mulsanne, Rolls Royce, Crewe, Silver Shadow

Id: i1Pwe-Pnstg

Length: 20min 58sec (1258 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 02 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/opposite_locksmith]

I put a Harvey Bailey “Handling” kit on my Silver Wraith II and I think the term is generous.... I’d call it a “repair kit” since without it doing over about 90 km/hr is terrifying.

[u/c0rbin9]

Ian Tyrrell's channel is one of the best and only channels on Youtube that focuses on high-end European classics. Every bit the equal of Jay Leno's or Harry Metcalfe's channels. Love it!

[u/c0rbin9]

His audience is super-enthusiastic too. That video only has 18k views, but there are already 2.6k thumbs up and 2 (TWO) thumbs down.

[u/drowninginteger]

I found out about his channel on Harry's Espada rebuild series, and it's by far my new favorite channel.

No drama, no shouting, no bullshit, just an incredibly charismatic Englishman who knows more about classic cars than I'll ever know about anything.