A Month In The Life Of: Bentley Arnage Final Series

I remember a few years later asking the company’s then new director of production Hans-Joachim Rothenpieler what he thought of the quality standards he had inherited and he simply growled, ‘I thought “stop production”.’ VW then re-engineered the Arnage to take the big old 6.75-litre engine it had never been designed to house, and from then until BMW stopped supplying engines in 2003 the two cars were produced together, ‘Green Label’ Arnages with 4.4-litre BMW motors with Cosworth twin-turbo installations, and ‘Red Label’ cars powered by an engine designed by Rolls-Royce in the 1950s, but extensively modified by Volkswagen to meet 21^st century emissions.

From there the car continued to evolve: in 2002 the Red Label was replaced by the Arnage R and Arnage T, its engine gained twin Garrett T3 turbos to replace the dustbin sized single T4, while in 2007 the Garretts were replaced by more modern Mitsubishi units, and the four-speed transmission upgraded to a modern six-speed ZF unit, capable of handling the 500bhp and 1000Nm of torque the big banger was by now capable of creating, at least 2.5 times the power the motor had when it first appeared under the bonnet of the S2 in 1959. I remember also my friend, Ti contributor and the man in charge of Bentley engineering post 2003, Dr Ulrich Eichhorn, telling me the last Arnage V8 would run on the unburned hydrocarbons coming out of the exhaust of the original.

This car is one of the 150 ‘Final Series’ cars, which combined the comfort levels of the standard Arnage with the power of the 500bhp Arnage T powertrain, with bespoke 20in wheels, a retractable ‘Flying B’ on the bonnet and numerous cosmetic refinements. But although many like the early cars for their undeniable value, it’s a safe if broad rule of thumb to say that, when it comes to the Arnage, later is usually better.

But how would this 17-year-old car feel, based as it is on an already 28-year-old design? Hopelessly off the pace, structurally inept and charming only to those blind to their manifest shortcomings?

It is hard not to fall for its looks alone. It is such a handsome beast, its 2004 facelift among the most successful I can remember, dominated by the twin pairs of bi-xenon headlights at the front. You find yourself just looking at it, in a way I very rarely do with any other car.

Really, however, it is that sense that this is a car built in a way cars simply are no longer constructed that is my most abiding memory of the Arnage’s static qualities. It is no one thing, and some of the factors that go towards creating it – like some of the parts bin switchgear – are not exactly positives, but together they create an ambience that is so different and so desirable despite its flaws, it made me want to keep it in my life before I’d driven it a yard. It’s the heft of the doors, the vast slabs of walnut, the extravagant luxury in the way the seats just gently swaddle your body and the richness, texture and aroma of that Connolly hide, carpets so deep you want to drive it barefoot…

I could go on but you get the picture. Everything in here that Bentley made has the look and feel of something designed first, justified second. That sense you get in almost all modern cars of fixtures that are just about good enough, of creators more concerned with the Bill of Materials than fitness for brand, is nowhere to be seen. To me, that is the very essence of what a Bentley should be.

Complete, of course, with a simply enormous V8 to which a couple of turbos have been bolted simply because they can. Regulars in this series will know a detailed breakdown of dynamic characteristics is not part of the brief, but when an engine plays so great a role in the creation of a car’s character – every bit as much as, say, a V12 in a fine old Ferrari – it is quite difficult to ignore. Of course it’s been a few years since they last made one, and the Porsche/Audi V8s the company has used ever since are excellent at what they do, but if Lamborghini is allowed to design a brand new engine from scratch as it has for the Temerario, why could Bentley not take the indefinite delay in the roll out of its EV programme as justification for doing another socking great V8, albeit designed to modern emissions standards? Naïve? Probably, but they’d sell stacks.

There is something so luxuriously lazy about this engine, and I love the fact that it would blow up long before it reached half the maximum operating speed of the Lamborghini V8. There’s enough torque just at idle to pull over a row of warehouses and because it is so exquisitely in tune with its gearbox you can make amazingly effective progress without ever exceeding 2500rpm; or you can jam it in your chosen ratio, pretend it doesn’t have a gearbox at all and see your rate of progress not only undiminished, but significantly increased. Which is a whole other and rather different sensation afforded by very few cars indeed, mainly other old Bentleys.

But all that is largely to be expected. If there is a surprise here, it is that the car feels so extraordinarily together. I let a friend of mine have a run up the road in it, a man with a fine and extensive accumulation of very carefully chosen fast cars, including an ultra-low mileage Continental GT Speed of very similar vintage, and he was amazed by it. Like me he had not expected it to be so free of the shake, rattle and roll you’d just expect of such an old-school car, designed last century without access to massive OEM resources. Indeed nor do I recall those Arnages in which I hurtled through northern France to Le Mans all those years ago feeling anything like so structurally secure. So maybe, knowing it would be the very last, they built this car unusually well; but I suspect not. Knowing Uli as I do, and how he and his team transformed the way Conti GTs drove in their early years without really telling anyone, I detect his hand in this. Shut your eyes and you’d swear you were in a Mulsanne, except I think the Arnage – or at least this Arnage – rides even better.

There are a few things to like less: I clearly picked the wrong time to run a car which once nearly did 20mpg but didn’t quite make it. In reality 17-18mpg was more usual. But probably it is the wind noise at speed that most reveals the car’s age, or at least the age of the seals on this particular example. Were one to cruise at much more than 70mph, there’d be a distinct rustling coming from around the wing mirrors, threatening to drown out the distant murmurings or the goliath V8.

But you can always turn up the music. I never did find a way to connect my telephone to it – which I could do in the similarly elderly Toyota Aygo I bought for my daughters to learn to drive in – but it didn’t really matter. I just suckered it to the screen – inelegant I know, but needs must – and loaded up the CD changer in the boot (remember those?) with all those Compact Discs I’ve not played in years.

The choice here is important; I have quite catholic musical tastes for a child of the 1960s, ranging from the usual Beatles and the Stones and some heavier stuff, to a broad range of the more unadventurous classical composers. And you’ll not be surprised to know it was music from the latter category I primarily chose: some of Mozart’s less jaunty numbers including his final, unfinished Requiem Mass, quite a lot of Bach and a bit of Beethoven because I’m still trying to like him more than I do. And the sound reproduction from the Naim system is quite incredible, reminding me just how much we’re happy to lose these days in compressed files downloaded from the regular streaming services. I don’t usually bang on about such matters in normal car reviews, but when your inputs and the car’s outputs in such regards are so integral to the overall experience, as they are in cars such as this, they cannot be ignored. So much so I briefly thought how much better even than that the sound would have been with some cleverly gyro-stabilised vinyl player on board, but concluded it would be a somewhat crackpot, if rather charming invention.

I’d like to say there were some aspects of my time with the car that caused the undeniable novelty of its arrival to wear somewhat thin. But it never did. I didn’t mind the ancient instrumentation because I could actually read the information it was imparting. I wasn’t stressed by the relatively small size of the boot (but could have been if departing on an extended family holiday), but was instead impressed by the presence therein of no fewer than four umbrellas. Nor was its size in any way irksome because it turns out this Bentley limousine is actually narrower than a current BMW 5 Series. I missed an extensive screen of available apps, internet connectivity and driver assistance systems to not the smallest, discernible extent. And I liked the fact that, save the requirement that I plug in my seat belt, it trusted me to guide it from place to place without swerving all over the road or driving into parked cars, and to absorb unmonitored the information it was imparting and choose the speed at which I was driving.

I’m not saying that were I to live my life another way there’d be an Arnage front and centre in it, even though apparently immaculate, late, low miles cars cost £40,000 or less. I’d just be too frightened, not of quantifiable servicing and running costs, but the bill that might result from something like an air suspension unit throwing in the towel. But for those less squeamish than I, there are some astonishingly affordable examples out there, for those who buy with knowledge and care.

I think a lot of what I liked so much about this car stems from the fact I exist in a state of advanced middle age, live in the country and have usually – though not always – found myself persuaded by the Bentley way of doing things. And excellent though the latest versions of the Continental GT and Flying Spur undoubtedly are, there surely exists above them space for something with that unique feel of the genuinely hand built, which imparts that sense that its designers and engineers regarded ‘good enough’ as a mere signpost on the road to its ultimate ‘extravagantly, needlessly, gloriously over-engineered’ destination.

What we are seeing in the upper luxury sector of the market is a renewed craving for authentic experiences that connect on an emotional level. Now they are so easily and affordably achieved, people in this space increasingly no longer care about power and performance. What they want is less easy to define but no less important for that. It is a sense of occasion, that indelible handprint of artisans and engineers over computers and robots that cannot easily be faked. The feeling of something lovingly crafted by the best in the business and the impression, if not strictly true, that it has been done regardless of cost. The result would be expensive but if you see the money being lavished on products from other marques in this space, I have no doubt it would sell. Especially were it powered by a brand new 6.75-litre V8…

Photography by Dean Smith