Jose. Posted December 8, 2019 Posted December 8, 2019 The oldest engine in production, Bentley's Mulsanne's 6.75-litre twin-turbo V8 turns 60 this year. We drive the first ever Bentley it graced and what may be the last one to celebrate At some as-yet-unannounced time in the not too distant future, a period of time best measured in months rather than years, Bentley will announce that the Mulsanne is finally being put out to pasture. By then it will have been around for 10 years and what Bentley plans to do for a flagship model next is not something to which I am privy. And I’ll miss the Mulsanne. When it came out, I wasn’t so sure about it. To me it looked slightly odd, an uncertain step after the majesty of all those Arnages and Turbo Rs. As the first top-of-the-range Bentley titan to be paid for entirely by Volkswagen money, I guess I was expecting something a little more bold. Yet I know no other car that has settled so well in its own skin over the years. To these eyes, it has aged astonishingly well and if it does indeed turn out to be the last Bentley to top the price list powered by an internal combustion engine, its future status will be assured. But, while we’re on the subject of engines, there’s something else I’ll miss even more when it goes: that massive lump of British bent eight aluminium under its gently sloping bonnet. It is the longest-lived engine in the world today, so far as engines still put into cars by their manufacturers are concerned. GM continues to make its small block and Ford its Windsor motor, both of which are older still, but only in ‘crate’ form for those wishing to replace wornout examples, built hot rods and so on. They are not used in new cars. The story of Bentley’s (or, more properly, Rolls-Royce’s) V8 actually starts in the early 1950s when it was recognised that the straight six in use at the time and which itself dated back to the early 1920s had reached the end of the road. What was required was a new motor that offered more power, more torque, more refinement and more reliability. More of everything indeed apart from this: they didn’t want any more weight. Tricky, that. A V12 was considered but dismissed on the grounds of complexity and weight, so the V8 configuration was chosen. Which I guess is why to this day so many people think it was a copy of an American engine, or a straight buy-in, like the Buick-sourced V8 used by Rover for decades. But it wasn’t, it was a pure Rolls design from the outset that hit its performance and refinement marks by displacing first 6.25 litres and then 6.75 litres, but did indeed weigh no more than the old 4.9-litre straight six by being cast not from iron but aluminium. Its survival over the years is all the more remarkable for the fact that its owners actually tried to kill it. Just as in the late 1970s Porsche intended the 928 to replace the already ageing 911, so Vickers – which owned Rolls-Royce in the 1990s – decided its new Arnage and Seraph saloons would be powered by modern BMW engines. But when VW bought Bentley in 1998, its first public act was to recommission the by now much missed old V8 and, at considerable expense, completely re-engineer the front end of the Arnage to take it. In time it would completely redesign the V8 too, mainly to allow it to meet emissions legislation, but also to improve its power and reliability. It’s been a few years since a single component on a modern twin-turbo 6.75-litre V8 was interchangeable with one from a 1959 6.25-litre motor, but no one would ever claim one was not a direct development of the other. Today, it is more than just a fabulous engine. It is unique. I know of no other motor that generates its power this way. These days it produces 530bhp, which is at least 250% more than it did 60 years ago, but the truth is that now Bentley has ditched diesel, the Mulsanne is the least powerful of all eight and 12-cylinder Bentleys on sale. But when it comes to torque, it bows to no one. It has 811lb ft of the stuff at 1750rpm, and the only reason it doesn’t have more even than that is that it would melt its ZF gearbox if it did. But such is the way it delivers that torque, at times it makes you wonder whether it needs a gearbox at all. Such is the age of this engine, its valves (just two per cylinder) are operated via long pushrods from a single camshaft buried deep in the vee, so the motor couldn’t rev even if Bentley wanted it to, which it absolutely does not. Peak power comes at, wait for it, 4200rpm, but the real joy of this engine is that it will still make you giggle at its magnificence if you never use more than 2400rpm. No one does effortless like this. And it makes an occasion out of every journey. Actually, you don’t even have to go anywhere: just sit in it, fire it up, give it a blip and you will be instantly aware you are in the presence of rather venerable greatness. Nor could there be a more appropriate car in which to fit it. The character of the Mulsanne and that of its motor are as indivisible as that of the 911 and its flat six. You climb up into that hand-stitched cabin, wonder briefly just how large a herd of cattle went into its creation, settle back into the best chair in the business – made in-house by Bentley – and when you think of the way you’d like that car to deliver its performance, that is what it does. Other cars such as V12 Mercedes-AMGs do tip of the toe response too, but they roar when extended. The old Bentley motor never roars, not least because it never allows itself to be extended. It thunders. Its manners are more akin to a pre-war steam locomotive than a current production car. You find yourself locking the car in gears because you don’t want your progress to be interrupted by anything so inelegant as a downshift. You let the torque talk.
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