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| Andrew Frankel - high speed driver extraordinaire |
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You may be curious to discover what it's like to drive a car at 200mph while cornering hard on a banked track. I know I was. Would I be fighting for control as a mile of tarmac flowed under the car's wheels every 18 seconds? Would the car start to float across the surface of the track as the wind - hitting the car with almost three times the strength of what the Beaufort Scale would call a hurricane - tried to rip us from the earth's surface? Above all, would I be able to cope?
I'd travelled at this speed once before - 11 years ago when your esteemed editor and I determined to find out just what happened when you introduced a McLaren F1 to a runway long and wide enough to land V-bombers - but that was in a straight line: had something gone wrong we could have spun down the road until the tyres burst without the slightest chance of hitting anything. Here, at the prototype test track in the heel of Italy, I was going to have to drive as close to the barrier as I dared.
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| Installing the all-important logging equipment before the off |
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The car, as you will have twigged by now from the photographs, was Bentley's new Flying Spur and the purpose of this exercise was to discover if it could become the first series production saloon ever to do a genuine 200mph. Given that the next fastest currently on sale - the Maserati Quattroporte - won't do more than 171mph, that would be some achievement. Any race car designer - or half decent mathematician for that matter - will tell you that to double the speed you have to square the power, but I knew already that power was one commodity the Bentley did not lack: its 6-litre, 12 cylinder, twin-turbo engine develops 552bhp or, to put it in context, it has more power than the Audi that won at Le Mans this year.
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