2010 Top Gear Awards: Grand Tourer of the Year

Aargh! A Camel!" is not what you want to hear while travelling at speed around a corner in a £130k GT. If you were to provide some sort of macabre menu of final phrases to hear before you die, it would also come very close to the bottom of my personal list, somewhere between "I think that's poisonous" and "What are you doing with that hammer?" Nevertheless, here we are, my German friend Juergen and I, both trying desperately to push the brake pedal of the new Bentley Continental GT into and past the shag pile and regretting the car's not-inconsiderable 2,350kg mass. To make matters even more bizarre, Juergen is a passenger. Juergen doesn't even have a brake pedal.
Words: Tom Ford




We howl to a stop in a chatter of ABS and mechanical straining some 20 metres before the camel, quite a distance before I thought we would. Even without the optional carbon-ceramic brakes, the GT can still shed speed when it needs to. The camel hasn't moved a muscle and bats six-inch-long eyelashes in what I imagine to be disdain. After all, if you live in a Middle Eastern desert and chew greenery with the same shape and consistency of knitting needles day after 45-degree day, it's unlikely that heavy braking is really that impressive. It burps up a grassy wad, casts the Bentley a withering glance and begins to chew as it walks away, its gait carrying way too much knee in an expanse of leg.


Perhaps the camel failed to recognise that this is the 2012 Bentley Continental GT, a significantly revised (I'm supposed to say ‘new' here) version of 2003's renaissance on wheels. To be fair to the camel, it wouldn't be hard: Bentley has opted for a safe refresh of the visual treatment. Mind you, the GT always managed to be as subtle as possible for a 198mph four-seat supercar, so maybe it's the right choice.


With the sunshine levering open every shadowy nook, second impressions are that new Conti is actually quite a lot different from how it appeared in the initial pictures and, once you've had a bit of time to stare, much more detailed than you first think. Bentley has used the same aluminium ‘Super Forming' technique it used on the Mulsanne (where single sheets of ally are heated to 500° centigrade and then formed using air pressure) for the GT's complex front wings and boot, and paid more attention to the sharpness of the creases throughout the rest of the body. Curves are more pronounced, creases are knife-edged, especially over the double-curvature of those front wings and the hip over the rear wheels. The result is a much tauter, more sculpted look, even though the profile of the car is almost exactly the same as before.

More obvious changes are thanks to new head- and tail-lights. The front set retain the traditional Bentley four-lamp arrangement, but this time swept slightly back and littered with LEDs. The rear lamps now creep gently around to the sides of the car, each lens comprised of a couple of big ovals that act as brake and running lights.
The rear end is what Bentley calls a ‘double-horseshoe', where the bootlid is framed by the extremities of the rear wings - again, a similar treatment to the bigger Mulsanne. The surfacing is definitely a fabulous feature. Every time you look through the door mirrors, you see that big swoosh that starts a foot in front of the rear wheel heave itself backwards - either a none-too-subtle hint as to the enormous power at your disposal, or really chunky thighs. Your call.

After a bit, it becomes a game to spot the other changes, because there are quite a few amendments that you don't see straight away. The front grille is more upright, and the matrix of the front-end apertures is supersized and extra-chromed, giving the front of the GT the appearance of an extremely aggressive industrial cheese-grater.
And although it still looks like an incredibly aerodynamic brick, the new GT also has a lower coefficient of drag than the old car (down to 0.33Cd), as well as a flatter underbody and a wider track. The change, wider by 41mm at the front and 48mm at the back, is obviously for handling stability purposes, but it also makes the car look very wide and low - no bad thing. There is also the option of new 21-inch wheels (standard are already quite huge 20-inchers), available in a variety of finishes including a chrome, which, I am ashamed to admit, I very much liked. Sorry.

The basic lay-out remains the same: the GT is a steel monocoque with a twin-turbocharged 6.0-litre W12 up front and driving all four wheels through a six-speed automatic gearbox from ZF. The motor now produces 567bhp and 516lb ft of torque, enough to barge the car to 62mph in 4.6 seconds and onto the aforementioned fingertip-width of the double tonne. It feels very fast, though not fist-bitingly aggressive, dispatching all that power and torque to the floor without any kind of significant exertion.
In a straight line, the new GT will happily charge towards the red line with barely a woofly whisper, relying on four-wheel drive and considerable weight to prevent any kind of wheel-spinning hysteria. For the record, the car is much louder from the outside, and sounds really rather brilliantly bellowy in the best Bentley tradition - imagine a distant, very localised earthquake coming from the spade-like exhaust tips, heavy on the reverb.


The four-wheel-drive system has also been adjusted to add a bit more sparkle to the proceedings, the torque split having been recalibrated to deliver 40/60 front to rear rather than the previous car's 50/50. That might sound like a fairly conservative change, but it makes a difference in tight corners; where the old car would be waiting for the understeer to peter out before it could apply power, the new Conti catapults out with a touch of tightening line and the ghost of oversteer. It's not really oversteering, and if you get stupidly aggressive, you simply understeer anyway, but coax the new GT into a corner and lean on the gas, and you can get the car firing out on a wave of release. It's like the first nanosecond before a car goes sideways, just as you rocket out the other side. It's not a drifter, but it is more fun than the old one.


Mind you, I have to admit something here. The launch for the new GT was held in the Sultanate of Oman, a place where it hasn't rained in any significant manner for nearly three years. That means that the perfectly smooth and modern roads have accumulated both rubber and sand in such a way that they are slipperier than freshly oiled ice. Anything other than a massively long sweeping corner came with a side order of tyre howl and fairly desperate understeer emanating not from the tortured physics of ultimate grip, but from the fact that traction is in seriously short supply in the first place. The issue being that in a rear-wheel-drive car, you'd probably be having more fun gently swaying the car sideways at slow speed - the GT just won't play. In the wet, on a bumpy UK road, it will undoubtedly be safer; out here, it feels big and heavy.


But it did underline one huge thing about the Continental GT - that the clue is in the name... for all the speed, this isn't supposed to be an acutely aggressive sports car, but a cruiser. At 80 per cent effort, it is still deeply impressive. The gearbox underlines the character trait: fabulous at cruising - less instant than you might expect from the manual paddleshift. In fact, it feels like it could manage more than a merely credible shift-time of 200 milliseconds - something underlined by Bentley's product plans: there will be Speed and Supersports versions of this GT, so room needs to be left for the harder variants. There will also be a less powerful V8 later in the year that promises a 40 per cent increase in efficiency


The best bit is still the interior though - a proper haven. The new car is so quiet that you can hear the rasp of your own breath, the twin-turbo W12 relegated to a burbling mumble somewhere below all the glorious leather. The new interior really is first-class, poised somewhere between a sports car and an incredibly upscale tannery. The big T-shaped dash sprouts from a spine of wood that runs between the seats, each plane polished and matched to perfection. Everything is skinned in a film of leather that smells gorgeous. Even the headlining and sun visors look and feel great. There are a couple of cheaper bits (the vanes in the air vents are plastic behind the front bezel, for instance), but generally it is a truly special place to be.


The new Bentley GT, then, is a useful extension of the ethos of the old. It's a good percentage better in most ways, but still sticks very firmly to the mission statement of Continentality: a bruising GT with the pace of a sports car and the luxury and civility of a limousine. The rumour is that Bentley regarded this car as its version of the Porsche 911, its own personal icon, and required an ‘evolution of the revolution'. It sounds a bit boring, but in an economic climate where outrageously shiny and new might well attract the wrong kind of attention, the new GT feels perfectly pitched. Despite the conservatism, it remains the best posh GT in the world.

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This article was originally published in the Awards issue of Top Gear magazine