The man from Budleigh Salterton council was adamant. “Of course it’ll be all
right,” he said. “People take their cars on to the beach all the time. Don’t
worry, it’s surprisingly firm.”
Beaches are never surprisingly firm. If anything, I’d say they’re surprisingly
un-firm. It doesn’t matter whether they’re made of shale, shingle, grit,
sand or big slabs of volcanic rock, they’ll munch you up and hold you fast
until the tide can come along to finish you off.
Over the years I’ve had to dig countless cars off various beaches around the
world. A Corrado in south Wales. A Saab Turbo in St Tropez. And most notably
of all, a massive Lamborghini LM002 on Hayling Island.
But I never learn. So I drove the £110,000 Bentley Continental GT onto the
shale at Budleigh Salterton thinking that its four-wheel-drive system would
get me off again. And with the words of the man from the council ringing in
my ears: “If it does get stuck, we’ve got a man with a tractor.”
Great. Except when it did get bogged down, the man with the tractor had gone
home.
Welcome then to the joys of filming for Top Gear which, incidentally,
returns to your television tonight. Albeit without the Bentley, which — when
I left the scene in the dead of night — was still buried in stones up to its
axles.
Happily, however, before mother nature intervened, I did have plenty of wheel
time with what is probably the most talked about new car of the year. David
Beckham is getting one. Elton John has bought one for his boyfriend. But I
hear that the first to roll off the lines will go to Gordon Ramsay.
Bentley, then, will be supplying the wheels to the kind of people who get
their diet from Atkins, their frocks from Versace, their Botox from Harley
Street, their tans from Barbados and their friends from the pages of Hello!
So what kind of car is it? Well the first thing you need to know is that it’s
fast in a wholly new and exciting way. Normally, a quick car introduces you
to each one of its horsepowers and torques with a lot of shouting and
growling.
Ferrari even invented a new type of exhaust that gets louder the faster you
go, and now everyone’s at it. Hit 3000rpm in an Aston Martin Vanquish for
instance and a little valve diverts all the waste gases away from the
catalytic converters and silencers and into what sounds like the room where
God practises shouting.
People who claim in court that they drove a really fast car without realising
just how fast they were going are either lying or stone deaf. Or they were
in a Bentley Continental GT.
It’s uncanny. You put your foot down, wait the tiniest of moments while the
turbos gird their loins, and then the view goes all wobbly. There’s no
increase in noise, no increase in drama. You just have time to register the
speedo needle climbing at what looks like a suicidal rate and then, with
barely a whisper, you arrive at wherever it is you’re going.
The secret to all this oomph is a 6 litre W12 engine which, for that little
extra something, has been garnished with two turbochargers. The result is a
set of figures that looks more like Swiss bank account numbers. And the
result of that is a top speed of 198mph. This is a very, very, very fast
car.
It is also very, very heavy. In fact, it weighs very nearly the same as a
Range Rover. So if your right foot fancies a work-out, you’d better stand by
for a wallet-shrivelling experience at the pumps. How does 10mpg sound?
Well, forget it. You’ll only get that if you hop out and push.
The reasons it’s so heavy are twofold. First of all, it is immensely well
engineered. Shutting the door requires teamwork, and it comes with the
biggest brakes ever fitted to a road car. And secondly, it has what appears
to be a couple of oak chests and 16 dead cows lining the interior. It looks
like Lord Kitchener’s library in there.
Sort of. Instead of making its own dials out of ivory and fitting a nice Alan
Turing-style computer with valves and ticker tape, Bentley has simply raided
Volkswagen’s parts bin. There’s barely a knob or a read-out in there that
hasn’t been lifted straight from the Phaeton.
And there’s more VW stuff behind the skin too. The engine for instance, and
most of the floor and, worst of all, the layout.
As is the way with Volkswagens and Audis, the engine is mounted as far forward
as possible without bits of it actually sticking out of the radiator grille,
and the power is fed to all four wheels. It sounds like a recipe for
terminal and dreary understeer.
But no. You arrive at the corner in complete silence doing about 5,000mph, dab
the brakes, but not too hard because they’re powerful enough to pull your
head off, and then turn in. Every fibre of your body expects the nose to run
wide and the peace to be shattered by the sound of a road-going second world
war bomber hitting a tree, but it just grips and grips.
If you go really fast — and I’m talking now about “tired of living” fast — the
back loses traction and you are presented with an easy-to-control power
slide. How they have achieved this when the layout is so obviously wrong I
simply do not understand.
But there’s no doubt about it. This is not just a luxury barge designed to
whisk you and your third wife off to St Tropez for a weekend’s bloating. It
is a truly wonderful, jaw-slackeningly awesome driver’s car. You could take
it to a track day and spend the whole time punting Ferraris and 911s into
the Armco. For a laugh.
Now shall we get to the bits that aren’t so good. For something that’s about
the size of a football pitch, it is cramped in the front to the point of
claustrophobia. And if the salesman tells you there’s space in the back for
any human life form, laugh openly in his face.
Also, I must say that while it has presence, it’s not handsome or pretty or
attractive. From the front, it looks like a Rover 75 and from the back, it
looks like a car. But then it was designed by a Belgian.
Then there’s the rear spoiler which pops up at 70mph — that should make the
job of the traffic cops a little easier — and the satellite navigation
which, I think, was on a work to rule. It was still working out a route to
Budleigh Salterton when it was already there and going no further.
In addition, the glove-box lid didn’t shut properly, the arm rests squeaked
and the endless succession of warning bongs and beeps drove me mad before I
was even out of Knightsbridge.
These, though, are niggles and I’ll find just as many in any car. Overall,
there is no single reason why you should not buy or dream about buying this
car. Unfortunately, there is also no single reason why you should.
With the new Phantom, BMW seems to have captured the essence of Rolls-Royce,
but I have to say that VW has failed to pull off a similar trick with the
Continental. Put simply, it feels like a big, fabulous, fast,
well-engineered Volkswagen.
I couldn’t help thinking as it hauled me down the A303 that I’d have enjoyed
the drive more in an Arnage. Oh, it would have been noisier and less fast
and it would have fallen apart on the twisting lanes of Devon, if it had got
that far without breaking in some way.
But the old Brit Bruiser has a grandeur that the Continental lacks somehow.
There’s no sense of occasion when you step inside. It’s a car you can
respect, but not love.
Let me put it this way: as I drove away from that beach the other night, in a
rented Nissan Primera, I wasn’t saddened that I’d had to leave the Bentley
behind. It had been, when all is said and done, just another car.
VITAL STATISTICS
Model: Bentley Continental GT
Engine type: W12, 5998cc
Power: 552bhp at 6100rpm
Torque: 479 lb ft at 1600rpm
Transmission: Six-speed automatic with paddle shift, four-wheel drive
Suspension: (front) Double wishbones, air springs (rear)
multi-link air springs
Weight: 2,385kg
Tyres: 275/40 VR 19
Fuel/CO2: 16.5mpg (combined)/410g/km
Acceleration: 0 to 60mph: 4.7sec
Top speed: 198mph
Price: £110,000
Verdict: An awesome driver's car but deep down you sense the soul of a
Volkswagen
