Bentley Continental GT Speed 2013 Review - International

What we liked
>> Effortless speed
>> Terrific ride quality
>> High-speed stability

You see, Bentley already has a perfectly good device that does exactly those things. It’s called the Continental GT and it’s the second generation of the car that gave the English brand its mainstream rebirth 10 years ago. No, this car is the Continental GT Speed and it’s the car you need if you want to show Continental GT owners you spent more money than them.

The Speed is faster and it’s more powerful. It has an extra aero trick up its sleeve, which only rears its head at speeds you’d be shot for in this country. It has some body detailing that only a Continental GT owner would notice. And it has stiffer suspension settings and tauter steering.

As with the stock car, the Speed benefits hugely from its new eight-speed automatic gearbox, retains its all-wheel drive system and pulls more power from the twin-turbocharged 6.0-litre W12 engine.

And there’s no denying it’s fast, ripping to 100km/h in 4.2 of the most graceful seconds you’ll ever spend on a hard burst from a standing start. It tops out at 330km/h.

PRICE AND EQUIPMENT
A lot more for not a lot more
Take a deep breath. This car will cost around the $450,000 mark when it arrives in Australia towards the end of the first quarter next year.

That’s a step up from the stock Continental GT of around $40,000 -- an impost that seems an awful lot for some software code and a new exhaust.

What you get for your money is the exclusivity of some tweaks around the body that other Bentley owners will spot immediately (but good luck convincing anybody else). You’ll get a darker tint in the grille mesh (Bentley’s Head of Marketing even called it a more “mysterious” grille), some chrome around the tail-lights, a bit of “rifling” on the inside of the exhaust tips and a body that rides 10mm lower than the standard GT.

The Speed also has new 10-spoke 21-inch wheels which are lighter and nearly 80 per cent stiffer than the old ones. Tyres are Pirelli PZero 275/35 ZR21s.

You’ll also have your choice of 17 standard paint finishes or, if you want to chip in a bit more, more than 100 other colours from Bentley’s extended paint range. If you really want to spend money, try taking in the wife’s favourite lippy or the husband’s old footy jersey and they’ll match the paint with that, too.

Inside, the Speed delivers a “Speed” kick-plate over the rocker, it has fully quilted diamond-pattern leather stitching on the seats and drilled alloy pedals. That’s all on top of the Continental GT’s dizzying array of standard kit and trim, including its beautifully milled knurled gearshifter and typical Bentley organ stops for the vents.

There is also a new generation of multimedia screen, which now delivers touch-screen options. Actually, they’re proximity screens, so you don’t quite need to touch them and you don’t need to dirty up the screen with your fingers.

It carries the best of everything inside, from the carpets to the seats, from the sound system to the leather stitching atop the double-wing dashboard.

The new wheels have 79 per cent more torsional rigidity than the old ones and are 15 per cent lighter to boot. The new car has 15 per cent more suspension camber than the old car and it gets stiffer anti-roll bars and bushes.

Technically, it has stiffer springs too, but as it runs air springs as opposed to traditional metal coils -- so that’s just a matter of software coding… As is the lowered ride height, which drops a further 14mm at 180km/h and another 6mm when it runs beyond 255km/h. All for aerodynamic stability, Bentley’s engineering boss Brian Gush, insists.

Compared to the old Speed, its front tyres sit 40mm further apart too, but it’s the same track width as the standard Conti. The suspension damping set-up adjusts continuously and if the automatic settings are too soggy or too hard. You can tweak it manually for more squish or more sport.

Deep inside that cavernous nose sits the Bentley’s gigantic engine. With its cylinders arranged in a W shape (traditional 12-cylinder engines have a vee angle), it’s an oddball. Still, Bentley proclaims it builds more 12-cylinder engines than any other car-maker.

Either way, the W12 is a powerhouse, thumping out 460kW of power at 6000rpm and cranking 800Nm of torque into the gearbox from 2000-5000rpm. The standard Continental GT’s version of this engine has 'only' 423kW of power and 700Nm of torque (even if its torque peak arrives lower, at 1700rpm).

However, that’s the advantage is not as clear cut as it seems. It’s only eight per cent more power and 14 per cent more torque and, given there’s not a single internal mechanical component that’s been switched out, you’d have to say it's the standard buyers that are short changed, not the Speed buyers that are getting something extra.

The biggest news is the switch from the old six-speed transmission to a new ZF eight-speed unit. This gearbox alone is credited with half of the Speed’s 15 per cent fuel economy improvement. It still uses at the rate of 14.5L/100km on the combined cycle, so don’t get over-excited.

Sixth gear is now the direct-drive gear while seventh and eighth are both overdriven, with the top gear being a touch taller than sixth gear in the old car.

The reason it uses so much fuel is that few cars offer this much heft-per-metre. It’s not small at 4806mm long and 1944mm wide (though if you try to drive it through a 1945mm gap, you’ll take the mirrors off), yet it weighs 2320kg.

Bentley offers myriad arguments to justify this, ranging from “You don’t want a car that’s too light” to “It’s on a par with the competition” (it isn’t) to “It’s lighter than it was”. None of which cut the mustard -- it’s miles too heavy.

The core engineering of this car goes into the Continental GT GT3 racer Bentley unveiled at the Paris motor show last month and that car weighs 1200kg. In between that car and this one stands 1100kg of sound deadening, emissions engineering and the sheer, unbridled luxury of things like double-glazed windows.

Up front, however, there’s enough footwell space for the passenger to cross their legs without scuffing any leather and the seat stretches back far enough that most people will be able to lock their knees straight. Assuming nobody’s squealing in agony from behind.

That double-winged dashboard gives the impression that the dash is quite deep (it isn’t) and the windscreen is a bit gunslit (it isn’t, either). It does provide a lot of room for a proper glovebox and there are wide storage spaces in the door pockets and in front of the gear lever, and there are individual armrests - each of which houses a thin cubby hole.

Front headroom is no problem, either, and it’s ergonomically sound for the most part.

The boot space is identical to the cheaper brethren, which means it’s good without being brilliant and you could happily cover a week away for two people with the gear you could store in there.

SAFETY
All-paw security
With 2.3 tonnes of metal, leather and wood at your disposal, most things are going to succumb to your sheer mass in a crash. For those things that don’t, the Speed delivers the exact safety package offered by the Continental GT.

That means a pair of airbags up front, side airbags for everybody and a knee airbag for the driver.

The added grip of the sportier suspension should help avoid crashes, too, as will the tweaks to the electronic stability control, the EBD and the aero.

There’s also active cruise control and should all that go haywire, eight-piston front brake calipers mount onto a 405mm steel disc, while there is a 335mm brake disc at the back. You can upgrade that to a 420mm carbon ceramic unit too, which also delivers a 356mm rear carbon ceramic disc.

COMPETITORS
Think German, dream Italian
Bentley offers an almost-unique package of speed, torque and comfort that leaves it out on its own a bit. But it’s only almost unique.

Bentley’s Mr Gush admits they benchmarked a lot of cars, which means you could consider all of them as competitors, because Bentley does.

For starters, they turned to Maserati’s GranTurismo Sport because it was the one car that offered more rear legroom than they did. More importantly, it boasts an engine note from the Gods.

“It’s a beautiful sound and it’s wonderful,” Mr Gush gushed.

His team also picked the all-wheel drive version of the Porsche 911 Carrera S as its steering benchmark (it’s also a four-seater) and they generally looked at the Ferrari FF as well, largely because of the Italian V12’s surprising interior practicality.

They also fiddled with cars like the Mercedes-Benz CL coupe and the BMW M6 Coupe, though the latter arrived too late to be significant to the Speed.

ON THE ROAD
Stupendously quick
You would expect this car to be ridiculously fast, since the standard Conti GT is ridiculously fast, from anywhere in the rev range and from any point on the speedo. After all, this one’s called Speed, so it must be faster…

It is, but not by that much. On a full-blown burst, this one hits 100km/h in 4.2 seconds, while the stock car needs another half a second.

Where it really hits its straps is in the sprint to 160km/h, which the Speed does in nine seconds flat. The Continental GT needs 10.3. It also stretches its legs out to 330km/h, which is 18km/h more than the standard car.

But the real cleverness of the Speed is not in cranking ever more power and speed out and tying down the suspension to keep it all on the road. That would be easy, but hardly Bentley. Instead, they’ve done it all in a way that barely impacts the comfort delivered by the standard car.

Even with the lower ride height, the slimmer tyre profile, the stiffer bushes and springs and anti-roll bars, the Speed still wafts along with an indifference to even the worst road that beggars belief.

You know, vaguely, that something’s happening down there, but it’s never allowed to penetrate the armour of the suspension, the seats or the body. It doesn’t matter what speed the car’s doing either, because the Speed simply takes all that bodyweight and crushes imperfections beneath it until they feel perfect again.

And not for Bentley are the purist ideals of a sweet spinning, high-revving supercar engine with a linear power delivery that develops from the midrange into a soaring, scream at 8500rpm. Instead, this engine takes stock of your key twist with a deep, mellow rumble and, save for a change of volume here and there depending on your ankle angle, that’s how it remains whenever and however you drive it.

In standard mode it’s a wonderfully quiet travelling companion, easily capable of turning any piece of scenery into a blur at the stomp of a pedal. With this much torque, the Speed simply refuses to be caught in the wrong gear. Even if it is in the wrong gear…

It just knuckles down, twists away at the crankshaft and steams ahead. For all that power and torque, it never feels like it being hurled urgently forward. That would appear unseemly. Instead, it surges towards where you want to go, carried on a smooth wave of elegance that smacks of a butler trying to help, rather than an Italian V12 trying to dominate proceedings.

But it isn’t perfect. Some more character in its engine note and delivery would be nice, and while Bentley benchmarked the Maserati for its engine note (and, in particular, it’s off-throttle burble and pop), it didn’t come close to matching it, much less surpassing it.

In Sport mode, the engine’s sound is louder, can become droney on a constant throttle and sounds artificial, and that gets worse on the overrun. The little crackling burble of the Golf GTI is more convincing.

Worse, some of the gearshifts in Sport mode were sharply snatched, especially at part- or stabbed-throttle openings and the engine occasionally kept pulling for a second when we came off the accelerator pedal. Both are situations Mr Gush admitted knowing about and insisted they were software issues related to hitting the CO2 emissions targets (338g/km). And he said they’d be fixed by the time the production cars emerged.

To circumvent this, you could switch it across into manual mode. But you can’t, because its gearshift paddles are fixed to the steering column rather than the wheel and are so ludicrously small that you can’t find them when you need them. You can’t intuitively use the gearshift lever’s manual gate either, because it shifts the wrong way.

It sounds wrong, but you’re better off leaving it in Drive, away from its Sports mode, to do its own thing. Then it’s unlikely to do anything wrong and it’ll be just as fast.

The steering is not quite sparkling either, as it’s a speed-dependent power steering system. It gets the job done, but it’s a tough job to do, with that entire engine sitting on top (and mostly ahead) of the front axle. Yet it’s not intrusive nor disappointing, even if it’s not Porsche-communicative.

The grip is stupendous, even if this car’s better geared for highways and cities than it is for winding mountain roads.

On a high-speed burst of autobahn, the Speed effortlessly streamed its way across the Bavarian countryside at 320km/h before we ran out of real estate.

And it did it without imparting to the driver any of the stresses it must have felt. It is, after all, sucking 4000 litres of air into the engine bay per second at 330km/h and at that speed fully 80 per cent of its power is spent simply pushing the air out of the way.

That air is also trying hard to lift the car into the air, so on top of all of its inherent weight, the pop-up rear spoiler adds another 125kg of downforce at top speed.

In the cities, the Speed’s a doddle to drive, easily slipping between gears and its soft initial throttle travel meaning you’re not accidentally diving into the hotspot of 800Nm without wanting to.

There are criticisms, though. The steering wheel’s switches are compromised. Severely. The indicator stalk feels too low and you have to stretch for it. Half the time you’re trying to indicate, you actually end up trying to change gear, so close is the gearshift paddle.

It’s the same on the right with the windscreen wiper stalk. I know the paddle shift thing fits with what the Continental GT stands for, but if they’re next to useless anyway, why compromise two key parts of any ergonomic package?

The pedals come in for criticism too, because the brake pedal sits quite high compared to the accelerator, which feels too soft for too long and only starts to understand urgency and nuanced adjustment in the last third of its travel.

The grip is unquestionable, though. We drove it in rain and sunshine and while we had the ESC light blazing here and there, the car tracked straight and true on the line we’d asked for.

There are probably dozens of cars with half the power that would be faster on a mountain road, but you wouldn’t arrive with quite this much dignity.

By far the biggest question, though, is the one of what you get for your money compared to the stock Continental GT. Intrinsically, you don’t get enough.

But these aren’t cars bought for any intrinsic need, so reason demands no place here.

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