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There was a time when turbo-something was about as cool as you could get. I had all sorts of plastic toys in my childhood arsenal that offered mega-this and ultra-that, but you could guarantee that anything with turbo slapped on the front was the supreme leader. These days, its presence on the packaging of razor blades and skin creams somewhat cheapens the effect, but back in the Eighties the only way to make something unsurpassable was to turbo it.

But what to do if you're already the maker of the most impeccable, sublime and ultimate machinery out there? Surely you can't just put a garish sticker on the back declaring it to be "turbo" and hope that an Arab will spend 20% more on it, just because he wants to be the coolest sheikh in the Sinai peninsula? Surely?

That was the dilemma facing the men down in Crewe, at Rolls-Royce headquarters, in the late Seventies. Being primarily an aeroplane manufacturer, the company had gone bankrupt and been nationalised in 1971. Desperate to redeem some sense of profitability, the automotive part was spun off as an independent company called Rolls-Royce Motors Ltd, and dragging Bentley with it, soldiered on in dire need of a new model to resuscitate its fortunes.

In 1980 that model came, in the form of the Rolls-Royce Silver Spirit. An entirely new car, it was rolled out as the ultimate luxury saloon, and fully lived up to the Rolls-Royce reputation. Yet the question of Bentley remained. For decades the marque had existed as the cheap version of whatever Rolls-Royce was making at the time, but the new owners of the firm, Vickers, rolled their sleeves back to their burly forearms and muscled in. No longer was Bentley going to live in the shadow of the Spirit of Ecstasy; it would bulldoze its own path through the luxury car market and make its own statement.

In that manner, the Bentley Mulsanne was released. Each frame lovingly worked from steel by hand, the Silver Spirit clone would share the same 6.75 litre engine as its sibling and its predecessors, with the only appreciable difference being that it wouldn't carry the Parthenon on its nose. Rolls purists may argue at this point that without the famous radiator grille, the car is nothing, but for Bentley it meant everything; most importantly the opportunity to cut loose the ropes that bound it to its bigger sister.

The Mulsanne moniker comes from one of the most famous straights of the Le Mans track, and under that name Bentley set its sights purely on performance, in the manner its founders conceived fifty years previously. With that in mind, the engineers analysed the carburetted engine and weighed up their options. The solution was simple, and it was snail-shaped.

An engine breathes. When you press the happy-pedal, you're not really doing anything with the fuel; you're controlling a little flap that regulates how much air the engine is allowed to suck in to make its explosions happen. In simple old engines, that draft would also suck fuel out of the carburettor, in much the same way as blowing across a beer bottle makes a noise. The more air, the more fuel, and the more noise you get from the engine. That means more power.

But there's a theoretical limit to the amount of air an engine can suck in all by itself, so anything you can do to push more air in will ultimately improve the performance. You could go for a supercharger, an electrical motor driving a fan, like the Lancia Volumex engines, or you can use a turbo charger. Turbos are a pair of fans; one in the exhaust, pushed along by the gases leaving the engine, which in turn drives another fan pushing more air in the other side. More air pushed in makes more gas come out of the exhaust, which makes the fans turn faster, which pushes more air in until you reach epic levels of power, and all of it at no extra cost to engine efficiency.

Or at least that's the theory. The downside is the octopus tentacles of pipework needed to make the whole thing work, and a little thing called turbo lag; the time between pressing the accelerator and the turbo having any effect. Aside from that, a turbo is a cheap way to get superior performance from an engine, as long as the engine is strong enough to cope with it.

The 6.75-litre V8 was more than capable, and in 1982 Bentley fitted its first turbocharger to the Mulsanne, christening the car the Mulsanne Turbo and in that way allowing it to carve out a fearsome new direction for the company. While Rolls-Royce modestly understated the power output of their cars, declaring them to be simply "adequate", the Bentley versions proved downright brutal in their power delivery, forcing up to 50% more out of the engine than Rolls' engineers had done.

This may seem like advertising hogwash, "new TURBO, with 50% more!", but Bentley were so confident that they modified the car extensively to make the Turbo its own model, and in that way 1985 saw the launch of the Bentley Turbo R, a 5000lb monster with 300hp to thunder it along, making the Rolls' 200hp pale in comparison.

If a Rolls-Royce is somewhat akin to driving a palace, the Bentley Turbo R is a fortress, fully armed and ready to fight. That's not to say it's not refined; tapestries and marble statues are guaranteed, and the Bentley is capable of the luxury you would expect from a hand-made saloon, especially one costing more than its Rolls rival. But plant your foot and this monstrous beast transforms into attack mode, squatting down on its stiff suspension and developing a throaty roar that belies its exquisite, classical exterior. Always ready to make a dig at the opposition, Bentley claimed they would need an extra 35hp if they wanted to achieve this performance with the Rolls grille on the front, since the chrome portico caused so many problems with the aerodynamics. In that way, Bentley were better of without it, blending their radiator shroud in with the surrounding paintwork.

Its presence on the market turned Bentley around, with that paltry 5% sales surging up to 40%, and by the Nineties, when this particular model was built, Bentley was on a level pegging with Rolls-Royce in production terms. That's not to say uptake was dramatic; less than 6000 Turbo R's were made before the model was phased out in 1996, but with each one lovingly crafted by old men with flat caps, hand stitching cow hide into sumptuous leather and trimming every available inch of the interior with walnut, you wouldn't want high sales volumes. One of the most reassuring elements is the exclusivity of owning such a machine, and in this case that exclusivity can be yours for just 90,000 zlotys; this one's for sale.

This Bentley may have been the first to sport alloy wheels and a turbo badge, but don’t let those flashy Eighties signs fool you into thinking this is anything other than a thoroughbred. The model went on to greater and better things, but as the car that brought Bentley back from the brink, the Turbo R could be argued as the most important Bentley in eighty years, and wears its badge with pride.

The word "rally" conjures up a number of images, mostly political leaders shouting furiously at

their supporters, or protesters gathered together under badly-spelt and poorly-painted banners. But it also has a connotation with cars, and not just any old cars but the most furiously powerful vehicles ever devised, cars that make your blood curdle, that make your muscles clench, that drag your skin away from your face as they claw another horsepower out of their fearsome engines.

Rallying, in motorsport terms, is the most aggressive form possible, demanding drivers to throw one-tonne machines down roads so narrow the navigator has to breathe in. On one side of that road will be a towering rock face of punishing, unforgiving boulders; on the other a sheer drop to the valley floor below. The car will have to scrabble its way across sand, gravel, mud, snow and asphalt to finish mere seconds in front of its rival, and that's if it finishes it all. Mechanical failures and serious accidents are common.

In that way, it has a lot in common with driving through Warsaw, whose residents feel that every stretch between traffic lights is a rally stage, to be completed in the quickest time possible. If that means bombing along at over 100km/h in the city centre, then so be it, and the pedestrians had best scatter if they know what's good for them. With bone-shattering bumps and crumbling asphalt, the city streets are unforgiving, and many a driver has shattered the alloy wheel of his company sedan in one of the capital's notorious potholes.

The Lancia Delta takes all of this in its stride. It would chew up the Polish roads, spit them out, then laugh. It might look like a mud-encrusted flaky white hatchback to you, but in its veins runs pure vitriol, a manic desire to be hurled sideways around corners, flicked this way and that around bends, and slid right on the edge of tolerance across the most inhospitable of terrain, for that was what it was designed for.

I can tell, you don't really believe me, and it's not hard to see why. The blocky little lump parked on a main street in Warsaw is someone's urban commuter, a disposable chunk of Eighties metal that slogs the same tired route day in, day out. No-one would really believe this was a thoroughbred stallion, let alone a warhorse. If it weren't for the chunky headlights and chrome grille, you could even kid yourself it was a Seat Ibiza, and I wouldn't hate you too much for saying something so insulting. After all, all cars of that period look the same. Or they do if they've been designed by Guigiaro.

Responsible for both supercars and superminis, Guigiaro pioneered the "folded envelope" concept whose angled wedges would dominate car design for more than a decade. Car upon car can trace their lineage back to his desk, including a large number of the rotters that litter Warsaw's streets today. The entire Seventies production of Volkswagen, including the Scirocco, Passat, Jetta and Golf are his ideas, if you're looking for someone to blame, along with Poland's Pride, the FSO Polonez. But when he wasn't sketching out the shells for shopping-trip slugs, he was designing some of the most magnificent cars of the time, including the BMW M1 and Audi Quattro, whose name is synonymous with the word "rally".

The Quattro and the Delta are only a year apart in age, with the little Lancia first seeing daylight in 1979 and the acclaimed Audi rolling out one year later. And bloodline aside, their initial designs give them little in common, but both found themselves competing head-to-head in the international stage, for in 1982 was another birth; Group B rallying.

Group B was the classification for the most brutal, powerful and comprehensively crushing racecars ever designed. I won't bore you with the details, but the rules were extremely lax as far as races go. Manufacturers had to produce as few as 200 examples of their given car in rally format, and while there were four classes for engine size, power limits were non-existent. Every year saw more and more power squeezed into the tiny frames, and the results were frightening. Lancia themselves produced the Delta S4, a four-wheel-drive ball of fury with 480hp kicking under the bonnet that launched its driver, Henri Toivonen, to a number of rally wins and, ultimately, to his untimely death in Corsica. After just four years, Group B was abandoned for simply being too powerful.

While that Group B variation was the most powerful Delta, it bore little in common with the main production cars. The far more famous model was the Delta HF Integrale, a leviathan of motoring that dominated world rallying for the five years after Group B finished, claiming 10 wins of 11 races in 1988. Its many guises masked a 2.0 engine that, in its final evolution, produced 212hp as just a standard roadcar, although the cars are so tuneable that its not unheard of to achieve more than double that figure, since Deltas are still raced today.

The GT i.e was the most perky model of the most mundane form of the Delta. With only a 1.6 engine up front and no turbo, the meagre engine bay was instead filled with the historic Fiat twin-cam engine, just like the bigger Fiat 132. The i.e tags denoted fuel injection, a desperate attempt to squeeze a few more horses from that engine, and in that manner give the Delta a whopping 107hp; not the sprightliest of cars, but the best available without resorting to rally-level modifications, and in that way your average commuter can feel like he's having a rally experience, without having to pay for one.

Those rally versions are now serious collectors items, with the Integrale variants carrying astronomical pricetags. But those non-supercharged, non-turbo'd, two-wheel drive cars received less than supportive views from the suburban press; its angular form was all too similar to a slew of other city hatchbacks with similar racing pedigree, and with such lowly underpinnings it was unable to cash in on the international renown of its sportier variants, and couldn't hope to compete in the showrooms in the way it did on the rally stages.

For a car that enjoyed a Car of the Year award at its birth and a twelve-year production run, these early Lancia Deltas are a surprisingly rare sight on the streets, especially in a country where every road is a mixture of asphalt and gravel. But for the Empress of the Rally, it has at least one admirer in Warsaw and, seeing her here, at least one more.

If the badge has been removed, the culprits are usually kids, building up a collection of exotic nametags from the world of motoring, a bit like scalp hunting. Psychologists may write hundreds of papers a year postulating the root causes of both kleptomania and collecting, while little research is done into the victim's problems. A denuded bonnet can easily lead to an identity crisis, or worse, and this British classic suffers from one of the worst illnesses of all; Multiple Personality Disorder.

As introductions go, ADO17 isn't the greatest of titles to have on your business card, but considerings its confusingly long list of pseudonyms there's little else the car can be referred to as. You see, the ADO17 (along with its little sisters the ADO16 and ADO15) was the ultimate in a business concept called Badge Engineering, and it lies at the very heart of why you don't see British cars around that much today.

Jump back in time to 1958 and take the business card of one Alec Issigonis, designer of the iconic Morris Minor and head of design at BMC, the British Motor Corporation. BMC itself was a monstrous sprawling agglomeration of British marques, most notably Austin and Morris but also MG, Wolseley, Riley and Vanden-Plas. Morris had bought these last four, and had then been bought out by Austin, leaving the corporation with manifold factories, models and designs, all competing with each other yet encompassing 39% of the British motor industry.

Alec Issigonis was drafted in to change all that. Employed by BMC in 1955, he was charged with producing a standard fleet of three cars; small, medium and large, that could be made by all of BMC's factories as a family. The only differences would be cosmetic changes to appeal to each marque's specific market. Issigonis went to the task with gusto and penned the three cars at the Austin Design Office for construction by the late Fifties.

Each of the cars he designed is exceptional its its own right, although ADO15 is by far the most famous of the three. Not necessarily known by that that name, since it wore a number of badges over the years, it was even launched with two monikors; Austin Seven, and Morris Mini Minor, or as the Poles irritatingly call it, Mini Morris.

ADO16 followed a few years later, and went on to become Britain's best-selling saloon for 12 of its 13 production years. While not enjoying the same international fame or cult status as its little-yet-older sister, the ADO16 still lies in the hearts of many of the older generation of British drivers as the car their grandfather had, whether it was an Austin or Morris, 1100 or 1300 engine.

Despite being planned first, the ADO17 was the last of the trio to roll out of its respective factories, but it bore underneath its exceptionally long frame the key points of the Issigonis family; a transverse mounted engine powering the front wheels. It seems like a tiny point to make, but it had a dramatic impact on every single sector of the car market, even today.

An engine, especially your basic four-cylinder job found in millions of Volkswagens, Skodas and Seats today, is shaped a bit like a domino tile; longer than it is wide. But all of the power comes out of the short sides, at a massive rotating disc called a flywheel, and there's nothing you can do to make the power come out of the long sides. Because of this, cars before the three ADOs generally had great long noses to house the engine in with a big gearbox bolted to the other side of the flywheel, and all the power going to the wheels at the back. It was efficient but cumbersome, and it took a hell of a lot of space.

Using some exceptionally clever ideas, the Austin team were able to strap the gearbox to the bottom of the engine, turn the whole thing sideways, and squeeze it all into a dramatically reduced nose. This is what allowed Issigonis's creative penmanship to design the Mini, with its distinctive piggish snout and miniscule length; there was no gearbox to smuggle along the length of the car. By upscaling the concept, BMC were able to make other cars with relatively small exterior dimensions, but massive amounts of usable space inside. Oddly, it was this space that was to be its downfall.

ADO17 was always planned as a sizeable car, pegged to enter the Medium sector where 1800cc engines were the norm. But even in that market it was a hefty beast, being six inches longer than its predecessors, and it looked it. Its bulky length rolled out of a factory in 1964 badged as the Austin 1800, although it almost immediately earned the nickname Landcrab for its thickset and stolid deportment. It's one of those original Mark I Austins that we see here; fortunately those thieving kids haven't been able to prise the name off the tastefully chrome-barred grill.

The Landcrab was intended as the flagship model of the BMC empire, and it was later rolled out under other names such as Morris and Wolseley to satiate the demand that BMC anticipated. But the demand simply wasn't there. The British buying public of the Sixties saw no need for such a large car, and this was clearly demonstrated in the sales figures; despite having over a quarter of all car sales in Britain, ADO17 mustered a mere 3% of it. In so many ways, it was simply too big.

BMC had on its platter a number of semi-luxurious marques; both Riley and Vanden-Plas were recognised as exemplifying a class of sorts, and the Landcrab's little brothers had been released under those brands. But with disappointing sales, the ADO17 was released under the far more mundane Austin and Morris brands; obviously to cater to the larger market, but robbing it of the elegance it so desperately needed. And there was no more room for the car to grow into either; it was already eating into the Big Car market occupied by its stablemate, the 3-litre Austin Princess, which it rivalled on both size and price.

Unsurprisingly, the car was a flop. BMC's sloppy management of its various brands led to it being absorbed into the much larger Leyland Group in 1968, just four years after the ADO17's launch, and all plans to Brand Engineer the car further, with Riley and Vanden-Plas releases, were shelved. The new management had much more important things on their mind, like trying to make the Mini and the ADO16 profitable, for once. It wasn't until 1972 when attention returned to the Landcrab so that, eight years after its launch, it got an upgrade in the form of a 2.2 litre engine.

But the damage was done. Despite its siblings selling in massive numbers, the ADO17 sold less than 400,000 in eleven years. Its confusing identity and equally radical personality pushed it far beyond what the public were prepared to accept, and in 1975 it conceded defeat to the might of Ford's offerings, the Cortina and Granada, and bowed out of the ring.

The British Leyland Motor Corporation didn't last longer either; it's disastrous approach to model and marque management had brought it to its knees and in 1975 it was nationalised as British Leyland, a government-owned entity making up 40% of Britain's motor industry. With it, large swathes of automotive history was wiped away; no more Wolseleys or Rileys would be made, and both Austin and Morris are long since gone and unlikely to return.

For that reason, the badge removed from this car could be any from the BMC group. They are all equally important, and the lack of of them on the bonnet of any car, either classic or modern, is something we all should miss.