Background
Built between 1998 and 2009, the Bentley Arnage replaced the much-loved Mulsanne Turbo. Broadly the same as the Rolls-Royce badged Silver Seraph, the intention had been to break with tradition by binning the legendary 6.75-litre V8 in favour of a much more modern BMW V8 32-valve engine with a Cosworth-engineered twin-turbo installation.
The Seraph, on the other hand, while very similar under the skin, was given the BMW V12 engine to take it to even greater heights than the Bentley – and yet, in a plot twist worthy of an airport novel, BMW threatened to stop supplying engines after VW took control of Bentley, so VW went back to using the 6.75-litre turbocharged Rolls-Royce engine we’d all come to know and love.
The BMW-engined cars are referred to as the Green Label, while the Rolls-Royce-engined version you are looking at here are the Red Label. The latter received larger wheels and brakes to help cope with the engine’s greater weight, and both models got a slightly stiffer bodyshell with the introduction of the 2000MY vehicles.
Of course, venerable or not, VW couldn’t resist the urge to tweak the turbocharged V8, eventually upgrading more than half of the engine's components, replacing the old Zytek engine management system with Bosch’s Motronic ME7.1.1, and replacing the single Garrett T4 with a pair of smaller Garrett T3s.
The resulting engine, which found a home under the bonnet of the Arnage R, was rated at 399 bhp and 616lb.ft of torque.
Which should have been enough, surely?
But in this rarified world enough is never enough and VW continued to experiment by adding twin charge coolers, which lifted those figures to a gargantuan 450bhp and 645Ib.ft of torque, making the Arnage T you see here “the most powerful production Bentley ever made” at the time.
