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| Click for Bentley Continental Flying Spur Gallery |
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Sometimes the best moments are those you don't plan. This one involved coming out of a toll booth on a European motorway and seeing three deserted carriageways ahead of me and, critically, another Bentley Flying Spur behind me. There was, literally, no other traffic on the road, and the driver of the other Spur was a colleague I've worked with on and off for 17 years and trust implicitly. If ever there was an opportunity to put to the test Bentley's claim that the £115,000 Spur is the world's fastest saloon, this was it.
So down went our feet, and round the dials the speedo needles went sailing. By ultimate supercar standards, the Spur is not that fast because it weighs nearly 2.5 tonnes - the poor thing will only just crack five seconds for the 0-60mph run. But as momentum is gained, the influence of weight diminishes and what matters most is aerodynamic efficiency, which the Spur has in spades, and horsepower which it has in spades, hearts, diamonds and clubs. I won't tell you what speed we reached as I like to leave a little something to keep your imagination working and me in a job but by the time the massive brakes bit, neither of us was in any doubt at all that the Spur would, given rather more space than we had, reach its claimed 195mph top speed.
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| Top speed of 195mph entirely realistic |
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You don't need to do more than glance at these pictures to know that the Flying Spur is closely related to the hugely successful Continental GT. But, in fact, while the Spur will reach the market in June, some 18 months after the Conti, the two are, in fact, sisters developed side by side. Together they will take Bentley production from around 1000 units in 2003 to nearly 9000 units in 2006. Indeed, so successful has the GT been (and the Spur is predicted to be), the factory will soon not be able to cope with demand and about ten per cent of production will be transferred to a Volkswagen facility in Dresden where workers are currently twiddling their thumbs, on account of the slow sales of the VW Phaeton that's built there.
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