BLOWN APART
A RECURRING THEME when you’re writing about classic cars for a living, especially when the majority of them are British in origin, is that history has taught us that if the British car industry has one strength it’s creating success from unlikely origins.
Think MGF, Land Rover Discovery and countless others. And so it is with the pair we have here, both of which took an ageing design and created a car that won universal praise.
In the case of the Bentley, no vehicle this large and this heavy has any logical right to offer such cross-country pace, yet the basic design underpinning the unlikely hot rod stems from the 1965 Silver Shadow.
The Daimler, meanwhile, was derived from the Jaguar XJ40, which, while it appeared as late as 1986, had been in development since the Seventies. Smaller and lighter than the Bentley, it’s still a big car, but offers the impressive combination of performance and refinement that was for so long unique to Jaguar products.
On the face of it, then, both appear quite similar. In practice, they’re really very different, as we found out when we attempted to choose a winner.
Before going any further, if you have your heart set on a Turbo R, then nothing else will probably do and, although you might nod appreciatively at the supercharged Daimler, we are unlikely to
