New Car:2018 Bentley Continental GT- Test Drive — First Look
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Drifting on packed snow with the throttle nailed and the tail cocked full hooligan is questionable behavior in a $200,000-plus Bentley Continental GT Speed—especially when it’s a prototype only two-thirds of the way through its final development schedule. But such activity, plus three encounters with roving reindeer herds, is par for the course when you’re embedded with Bentley’s top engineers wrapping up their winter test routines near the Arctic Circle in Swedish Lapland.
Full disclosure: This report deviates from our first-drive review norms. While we did drive a camouflaged third-generation Continental GT, scheduled to appear in final form at this fall’s Frankfurt auto show, for every minute in the driver’s seat we experienced an hour as a passenger. Compensation came in the form of unrestricted dialogue with three of Bentley’s top engineers: head of quality Jürgen Kern, powertrain chief Paul Williams, and whole-vehicle engineering director Cameron Paterson.
Bentley’s supercoupe is essentially an eleven-tenths-scale, five-times-as-expensive, 200-mph Britain-built Chevrolet Camaro SS. Other than clinically jaded journalists, no one really needs such a car, though there are scores of lucky souls who want them: captains of industry, stock-market manipulators, oil sheiks, and pro athletes, for instance.
This is some of the grandest touring that a very large heap of money will buy. While exceeding the GT’s previous blend of speed, poise, and luxury sounds like a film entitled Mission: Unlikely, that’s exactly what the third-generation 2018 model is engineered to do.
According to Paterson, this endeavor began more than four years ago when Bentley set about replacing the current GT, which uses underpinnings it shared with the late Volkswagen Phaeton. The VW Group store offered two platform candidates—one engineered by Porsche, the other by Audi. Several factors tilted the decision in the Porsche direction. Bentley CEO Wolfgang Dürheimer, who spent a fruitful decade at Porsche, aspires to purge the winged-B brand’s stodginess through participation in GT3 road racing and by appealing to a younger clientele with more agile products. To that end, Porsche’s MSB platform offered tantalizing credentials: more aluminum to trim hundreds of pounds of weight, significantly better weight distribution (achieved by shifting the front axle several inches forward to pass through, instead of behind, the engine), and ready hybridization.
The building blocks discussed with the Bentley boys are impressive. To supplement the 300-to-400-pound weight loss, aero drag has been reduced. The new twin-turbo 6.0-liter W-12 is a claimed 18 percent more fuel efficient, contributing to an overall mileage gain of some 20 percent. No final power or fuel-economy figures have been released, but Bentley promises the new Continental GT’s W-12 will make “more” than 592 horsepower and 530 lb-ft of torque. The company projects a sub-4.0-second zero-to-60-mph time and a top speed in excess of 200 mph.
A new ZF eight-speed dual-clutch automatic transmission sends torque to both axles through a variable clutch that energizes the front wheels on demand to minimize rear-tire meltdown during acceleration and front tire scrub during hard cornering. A key thing to know here is that the Bentley’s new all-wheel-drive system (standard in this W-12 model—we’ve been told nothing about any equivalent to today’s V-8 version) operates in 100 percent rear-drive mode by default and shifts torque to the front wheels only when it detects slip at the rear. Previously, an AWD Bentley was more Audi-like in distributing torque to all four wheels all the time (in a 40/60 front-to-rear proportion). While the outgoing Continental is already one of our favorites in the ultra-GT class, this new edition seems like the quarter horse that sent the old gray mare to pasture.
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