Rolls Royce or Bentley owners

Look at this thread:

http://www.ferrarichat.com/forum/showthread.php?t=62385

 

Hi! Have you done anything as far as getting a Royce or Bentley yet? I owned a 1991 Bentley Turbo R and an 1988 Silver Spur, so I can talk a bit about them.

First off, Royces are either terrific cars or terrible ones. My spur is great, I still have it and I've paid $110 in maintenence over the past 18 months.

My bentley was not. I paid $17000 over the same time period fixing things on that monster.

I examined the Rolls personally, the bentley I bought sight unseen out of Florida (I know, my mistake). It was constantly broken.

Electrical systems are the achilles heel of the Spur-based cars. This changed in 1993-1994 with an all-new electrical system, although the post 1994 cars cost quite a bit more than the earlier ones, but for good reason.

The 6.875 L V8 engines are bulletproof, and one of the finest engines ever created. Whoever it was on the other post who recommended replacing it with a piece of crap like a chevy 350 should have his head examined. Especially in the Turbo R. You wouldn't believe that something that big (and they are soooo big) can get up and move like that.

Another common problem I've run into looking at these cars on the market, and from experience (in the Turbo R), is that some seem to develop phantom fuel leaks. I had the back end of my turbo R completely torn apart looking for this thing but we could never find it, and I unloaded the car with it. That was the single most frustrating experience I had with it, as did a friend of mine here in KC in the RROC who also had a Turbo R.
Smell the car you want to buy, and if you can smell gas at all, avoid it.

Now for how to identify which one to buy:

1. No gas smell (we already estabished that).
2. Check the wood on the driver's door, and the dash next to the glove compartment. The driver's door should be crack-free, and you may see a screw on the dash. this is a good thing. Those dashboards are 1/4' thick pieces of wood, and almost always flex at some point, especialy in these older cars. The screw is evidence of this being corrected, an indicator that the car was cared for. It's a small thing, sure, but if the owner cared enough to fix that, then chances are he cared about other things as well. The wood on the door cracks if the car's been left outside (heat and cold do a number on that driver's door for some reason, which is also an indicator of prior care.
These things will tell you if the car warrants a proper, closer examination by a trusted mechanic (PPI), but if you're here on the Ferrari Chat forum, I'm sure you're familiar with that.

3. Check out the suspension carefully. In the late 80's, Rolls Royce went to this really complicated computer controlled ride shock that costs a fortune.

4. Check out EVERY button.

5. DON'T buy out of florida. The salt air and heat for some reason do a number on these cars. The salt gets in the electrical system. The heat kills the rubber. I bought my bentley in October 2000, and on the first really cold night that I left it outside, I came out to a rainbow of fluids under the thing. I think every seal and hose went. It had spent its whole life in Miami.


6. PAy more for a better car. It will cost less in the long run.

Now, once you get the car, another piece of advice:

Buy the parts off the internet from England, and have them shipped. You can usually get them within a couple of days, and the cost is a fraction of what it is here.
An example is the Electronic Ride Shocks I was talking about before.
The Roads here in KC are notoriously terrible, and The last winter that I owned my Turbo R we had some snow which put the most terrible potholes on Southwest Trafficway. I hit one of these and It blew out my front shocks.

My Mechanic called several in-the-u.s. Rolls Parts dealers, and the best price he could find was $1688 each.
I nearly had a cow at the prospect of a $3300 shock job!

I did some research and finally ordered the shocks from www.rolls-parts.com in the UK for what came out to be $630 each. Now, mind you, a $1200 shock job was bad enough, but I got it done for about a third of what it would have cost otherwise. It took 48 hours to get them shipped.

The dollar is way down on the pound from what it was in 2002, but I still think this is a better bet for parts.


One last thing: If you get used to driving a rolls, there is nothing else like it at all. Period. Nothing else coddles you in that world of wood and leather and chrome. Nothing instills the feeling of security that one of these 6000 pound monsters produces. Every trip is an event. Every other car you drive is a flimsy, crappy toy.

In addition to the Bentley and My Spur, I've owned or currently own a Ferrari 308 and a Mondial, 3 Porsches, 2 Mercedes, a BMW and a Jaguar.

I love my 308, for what it is it is nearly perfect, sounds great, looks great, and handles great.
My daily driver is a 1994 Jaguar XJS 4.0 Convertible, and I love it, too.

But my Mason's Black over Red with black Piping Spur is my favorite car.
So much that I'm already planning my next car purchase, which will be either an early-nineties Bentley Continental R (post 1993 electronic system) or a Early eighties Corniche convertible.

I hope I've been a help.

Good luck,
John