PUT TO THE TEST
Over the years, every piece of advice I’ve ever given in print or received from a specialist concerning the Rolls-Royce Silver Spirit and its Bentley derivatives is that in order to avoid a potential money pit of nightmarish proportions, it’s essential to commission a professional assessment before purchase. These cars may appear conventional in many ways but Crewe very much ploughed its own furrow when it came to the detail engineering; it’s the hidden faults that can trip you up financially and which mean the modest cost of a specialist inspection can often be repaid several times over if it directs you to the right car.
All sensible stuff, of course, which is why quite naturally we threw caution to the wind when acquiring our Bentley Turbo R project car, buying it unseen on the basis of photographs and its low mileage of just 47,000. The reasoning, however, was perhaps more sensible: there’s little point in running a pristine Turbo R for a magazine project as the car would provide very little to write about. We’d also looked at enough examples already to know where the bodywork issues
