How Just One Car Saved Bentley From Being Killed Off By Rolls-Royce

How Just One Car Saved Bentley From Being Killed Off By Rolls-Royce By the late 1970s, Bentley was barely a brand at all. In the great halls of Crewe, Cheshire, it had been reduced to little more than a cheaper badge bolted onto a Rolls-Royce, a quiet afterthought wearing a different grille. Sales had withered to a trickle, the cars were near-identical twins of their more famous siblings, and inside the company the unthinkable was being discussed in earnest: switching off the Bentley name for good and letting a once-glorious marque, the winner of Le Mans and the maker of the legendary Blower, fade into history. Then came a bold, almost reckless idea. Strap a turbocharger to the old V8, tune the chassis to match, and give Bentley something Rolls-Royce never had: a pulse. The Mulsanne Turbo, and soon after the monstrous Turbo R, transformed a sleepy luxury saloon into a two-ton thunderbolt that could embarrass sports cars. Suddenly Bentley wasn’t the cheap cousin anymore. It was the fast one, the rebellious one, the one buyers actually lined up to own, and the numbers quickly proved it. This is the story of how a single turbocharged car rescued a dying brand from the executioner’s block, and how its success made Bentley so valuable that, by 1998, Volkswagen and BMW were locked in a ferocious bidding war over Crewe, a fight that would ultimately tear Bentley and Rolls-Royce apart for good.