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The thing that struck me most when that long door swung open and offered me my first look, was how British – how proper it all seemed in there. Simply the best old bean – from the cross-padded leather chairs to the opulent feel and scent it offered.
The driver’s seat is most adjustable and that bevelled instrument binnacle adds even more to that Opulent feel of a recently lost empire…
Strange though … while it feels a little less sophisticated than its obvious Hun rivals in fit and finish, the Bentley certainly has them trumped in character – that it has and then some. There’s a hangar’s worth of space in there, the boot is big enough and Flying Spur ticks all the right limo boxes, too.
Put the old fashioned key into the old fashioned hole, twist and it whirrs to life in a gruff idle that sounds like how I’d imagine a giant dinosaur would purr. Blip it and it wails into a frenzied, screaming roar.
“Then you drive it and Speed soon shows you how to best overcome two and a half metric tonnes”
Like the old keyhole, most of the Bentley’s controls are pretty old fashioned too, which is pretty much how most of the privileged few who ride such a thing will be anyway. They leave the mouse and keyboard to the secretary in the office, so that lack of some outer space knob would be welcome to the majority of the folk who’d get to drive one…
Then you drive it and Speed soon shows you how to best overcome two and a half metric tonnes. Simple – with 450 kilowatts and 750 Newton-metres all the way from just off idle to where there’s enough power not to need it anymore. Takes a moment to spool up and get going in auto mode, but pull it all the way down to S and it behaves like a finely sorted sportscar.
And once it’s going, oh man, does it run. Look, at half a tonne over the already mass-challenged Audi RS 6, you cannot expect it to match the record-setting times that car set – but it still impresses, even with a large farm animal – or the Springbok tight five in tow.
Massage it a bit and Flying Spur Speed blasts to 100km/h in five seconds dead up on the Reef, dispatches the quarter mile in 13.2 seconds at 174km/h and flattens the standing start kilometre at 229km/h in 24 seconds.
Check out the comparative figures online and you’ll quickly see that it matches everything you can throw at it – except perhaps that RS 6. Overtaking is impressive but it isn’t as quick as the S65 – that down to that moment it takes to respond, but rest assured – there is very little else that lurks in that neck of the woods.
It handles brilliantly too, the Flying Spur Speed. Sadly we were not able to take it to Kyalami as the track was out of commission for the time we had the car, but we expect it should quite easily match the similarly powerful Merc S 65 AMG. I reckon Speed may even trump it considering its all-wheel drive that will better accommodate its similarly obese mass. That, sadly, will remain speculation.
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