Requiem for a heavyweight: Saying goodbye to the Bentley Mulsanne and its 6.75L V8
We may never pass this way again.
The idea of becoming infatuated with something that powers something else is uncommon. It's also a bit weird. As humans, we don't often get enthralled with such concepts, let alone wax nostalgic about them. Nobody venerates the Duracells or the drive motor of their childhood Walkman. Very few get moon-eyed over the chipset that powered their first video-game system. It's a particularly geeky quirk only select hobbyists share, and I've found that car people and horology buffs are more susceptible to this than most. Despite being an enthusiast of both automobiles and wristwatches, I'm usually pretty far from someone who fetishizes mechanicals. Nevertheless, the end of 2020 has me looking back and taking stock of my automotive year, a memorable portion of which was spent with this bit of blue-blooded British royalty, a model that has now passed into The Great Beyond. Allow me a few moments to belatedly eulogize Bentley's venerable 6.75-liter V8 and the Mulsanne Speed.
It's ridiculous, really. I've never had the wherewithal to own any Bentley, let alone one with the company's legendary "six-and-three-quarters V8." (That's how the automaker refers to this engine -- you can almost hear the British accent and see the outstretched pinkies.) That said, I've been stupendously, irrationally fortunate to have a handful of six-and-three-quarter experiences that will forever loom large in my memory. So hearing that this engine's production line finally went dark late this spring after 61 years, well, the passing of the industry's longest-running production V8 made me a little sad and a lot nostalgic.
Of course, saying this Bentley's engine was ever the result of a "production line" is itself kind of misleading. I'm guessing that when you hear that term, you picture a string of imposingly large contraptions that manufacture widgets and then place those parts inside of larger parts. Or maybe you envision a conveyor belt of mechanical and electronic fantasy kept humming by a series of highly trained men and women wearing hard hats.
That's nonsense. When Bentley revealed that the 6.75's production facility in Crewe had idled, it disclosed that there were just seven folks assembling these engines and they had 105 years of experience among them. This sort of craftsmanship just isn't done much anymore, friends.
The Great Eight sitting under the Marlin Blue hood of this particular $377,965 Mulsanne Speed? It was built by Graham. Yes, just Graham, a production line of one. I know this, because Graham's signature is engraved on a metal plate atop this massive powerplant. It sits right there, front and center, like the identification tag that hangs next to a priceless work of art in a museum. Appropriately, the tag is one of the first things to greet you when you swing open the Mulsanne's gaping hood. Graham assembled this Speed's V8 in what I imagine was a blissfully solitary act -- building it from scratch in a cleanroom on a hefty wheeled engine stand, bit by polished bit, methodically constructing one of the world's most expensive jigsaw puzzles. I like to think there was classical music playing in the background. Wagner, maybe.
To be fair, this V8 is a thing of profound mechanical beauty, especially by today's standards. Open the hood of a modern car, and there's a 99.9% chance you'll be met by a nondescript plastic box with some bits of visible plumbing and wiring attached. Designed to muffle sound and subtly discourage owner maintenance, these powerplants appear like uncharismatic lumps that might as well power your home's HVAC or sump pump.
This is some of Graham's finest work. Thanks, chap.
By contrast, the Mulsanne's twin-turbo V8 looks like the expensive, powerful and special thing that it is, seeming both weighty and inherently mechanical. Look at that central spine of intake runners, snuggled just so. They're flanked by a pair of ribbed metal valve covers, each of which looks like they must weigh a good 50 pounds. If you happened to find yourself in a train museum and decided to steal a look beneath the engine cover of a steam locomotive, if you saw this Bentley 6.75 staring back at you, you'd nod approvingly, as if to confirm you'd suspected it'd be there all along.
Admittedly, not much more than the bore spacing and configuration remain from the V8's original 1959 design. Then again, Bentley hasn't exactly been known for blisteringly quick product improvement cycles -- especially prior to its Volkswagen Group ownership. Unsurprisingly, then, popping the hood on this Mulsanne Speed gives me a profound state of deja vu that stretches back well over a decade.
I've stared at several examples of this wonderful L-Series mill's 36,000 siblings after a number of particularly memorable drives, if only to hear them tick, hiss and cool after a workout. In 2008, I sampled one of the very first Brooklands Coupes to come off the line in the UK, putting hundreds of miles on it in and around the gorgeous roads of Tuscany.
Months later, I would take my then-young son tent camping in another Brooklands in rural Ohio, blatting down country roads as the engine swilled high-test gasoline in a gloriously indulgent mechanical bacchanal. My boy's eyes were as big as saucers on that drive -- almost as big as the eyes of the disbelieving others sharing our campground later that day.
Pre-glamping with the 6.75-liter V8-powered Bentley Brooklands in 2008 in the time of low-res photography.
Not long after -- about 10 years ago -- I drove one of the first Mulsannes of this final generation at its launch gala in Scotland. I vividly recall nervously piloting that sedan's substantial girth on narrow country lanes. I had never driven anything close to that wide from the other side of a dashboard before. It took a while, but I once again grew comfortable enough right-hand-drive to open up the 6.75, and it wasn't long until I was wheeling the three-ton sedan at a startling rate of speed.
Like I said: stupendously, irrationally fortunate.
I admit it's a bit odd that a traditional, ultra-luxury sedan of the Mulsanne's price and magnitude has never offered V12 motivation, but with 505 horsepower and 752 pound-feet of torque out of the 6.75, this Mulsanne Speed isn't just quick, it's also far more of a driver's car than you'd expect. A lot of that is directly attributable to the V8's ready power and lusty, bellowing tone. This isn't a high-revving V8, and that's just fine. The spec sheet's heavy-duty-pickup-worthy torque figure rumbles in from 1,750 rpm and sticks around to around 4,000 rpm, by which point the ZF eight-speed automatic has obsequiously plunked you in the next gear to keep you in the meat of the power band. Modern gasoline V8s don't sound like this, and they surely don't rev like this -- in a way, the 6.75 feels more like a diesel than anything else, inexorably chugging faster and faster.
Yes, Bentley's own Continental Flying Spur can be had with a pair of lighter, more efficient 8- and 12-cylinder options that allow the far-less-costly sedan to be quicker, faster and better handling. In fact, there's no doubt the 6.75 is a roaring anachronism, what with its pushrods, cam-in-block design and two-valves-per-cylinder layout. In this regard, the engine's old-school vibe is not unlike Mulsanne, itself a gloriously hand-built throwback to a different motoring age. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, with its engine going out of production, the Mulsanne range itself didn't last a month before its epitaph was signed, too -- Bentley confirmed the end of production at the close of June with the completion of the final 6.75 Edition, the last of 30 special sendoff models.
How many Mulsanne drivers wash their own car? Not many, but we toil for you, dear reader.
Last month, Bentley announced plans to go fully electric by 2030 -- a pretty remarkable goal for a company that presently only offers a single plug-in hybrid. In the past, Bentley may have spent entire decades pickled into indolence by its own traditions and the lame state of its finances. However, thanks to the Volkswagen Group's processes and capitalization, today, the company and its vehicles exhibit substantially more urgency than even a decade or two ago, so this goal isn't as outrageous as is may seem.
The truth is, the idea of an all-electric Mulsanne resurrection strikes me as a glorious one (albeit an entirely different kind of glory than the car seen here). Big Bentleys have always been about combining obscene luxury with monstrously torquey powertrains in profligate, overweight packages. In fact, Crewe's vehicles have long delivered confounding levels of athleticism that seem impossible in such big bodies. Those virtues and vices all scream "EV" to me. And with the UK being on the leading edge of both taxing and banning internal combustion engines into irrelevance, Bentley surely has motivation to surge ahead with its battery-powered development programs.
Despite all of this fawning about a behemoth, gasoline-swilling relic, I am very much on board with our electric future. I love EVs, and their instant and seemingly boundless torque will make a wonderful and appropriate counterpart for future Bentleys. That said, many years from now, I cannot fathom that anyone will be eulogizing the passing of the electric motors, battery packs or controller that power the first Bentley flagship EV, no matter how sublime or rule-breaking that vehicle ends up being.
We will never see the likes of another six-and-three-quarters V8, let alone another Mulsanne like this one. That's undoubtedly a sign of a greener, more progressive and higher-performance future, but that doesn't mean that the automotive world hasn't lost something very, very special.
