BATTLE OF THE BIG BRITS
Although this is a recurring theme when writing about classic cars for a living, especially when the majority of them are British in origin, history has taught us that if the UK’s motor industry has one strength, it’s creating success from unlikely origins. Think of the MGF, Land Rover Discovery and countless others. And so it is with the pair we have here, each of which adopted an ageing design and created a car that went on to win 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, and 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 may have appeared as late as 1986 but was actually in development as far back as the 1970s.
Smaller and lighter than the Bentley, the Daimler is still a big car by European standards, offering the impressive combination of performance and refinement that was for so long a trait of all Jaguar-derived offerings. On the face of it then, both of these cars appear quite similar… but in practice they’re really very different, as we found out when we attempted to choose a winner.
BENTLEY TURBO R
Before going any further, it’s worth addressing the elephant in the room: if you have your heart set on a Turbo R, then nothing else will do. You might nod appreciatively at the ‘blown’ Daimler but it’s unlikely to steer you from your goal. And it’s easy to understand why you might have got to
