Welcome to San Francisco, where today, you find us armed with this Bentley Continental
GTC Speed and a problem.
That problem being that I'm not entirely sure what kind of car this thinks it really is.
It is a Bentley so you'd expect it to be some kind of ultimate long distance touring machine.
On the other hand, it's also an open Bentley, which says to me that this is a car which
well may be more about show than go.
Then again, Bentley says that this is actually the fastest open 4-seater in the world.
What we're going to do is head out over the Golden Gate Bridge and into America in search
of deserts, mountains, snow, city, anything really, which might be able to shed some light
onto the true character of this car.
Is it any good to take skiing?
We are now 8000 feet up a mountain to find out what it is like in snow.
It's really very good.
It has 4-wheel drive and a nice set of Dunlop winter tyres on it.
However, the problem is that the boot is so small we can barely get our own luggage in
it, let alone a set of skis.
In theory, yes; in practice, probably not.
We've been driving for most of the day.
We've left the hubbub of San Francisco and the West Coast many hundreds of miles behind
us.
What we're doing is driving into the middle of nowhere.
If you're going to do that on these sorts of roads, the Bentley is absolutely brilliant.
The way that they have managed the airflow over the car, the improvement in the ride
quality of its predecessor really shows that despite the fact that it looks quite similar,
Bentley has done some serious and proper work.
In fact, if all you're going to do is this which is cruise on a wonderful sunny day like
today, it really is quite hard to think of anything at all that you'd rather be in than
this.
Next question: How does it handle?
This is after all a Bentley we're talking about.
By one standard at least, I think its handling is pretty remarkable; that standard being
what you might expect a two and a half-tonne convertible to handle like.
It's very stable, it steers very nicely.
You might even go so far to say as it's quite good fun.
By another standard, the ultimate standard of the best-handling cars in the world, there
is no way it could measure up with that weight and this configuration.
By those standards, it's still a good-handling car, but it's not the reason you're going
to buy one.
We've come down out of the mountains back down to sea level, below sea level in fact,
to Death Valley, which is both the hottest and the lowest place in the entire United
States.
We're here really because it's one of the few places where the roads are sufficiently
straight and sufficiently quiet to be able to exercise a car like this properly without
too much undue interference from the forces of the law.
The funny thing with this car is you read the material and it tells you it has 616 horsepower,
but when you put your foot down from rest, despite the fact that it gets to 60mph, apparently
in 4.1 seconds, it doesn't actually feel that quick.
You feel the momentum the car needs to gather first before you ever really get going.
There's quite a lot of inertia to overcome.
Once you get the speeds up to 60, 70, or some more unpublishable speeds, and then put your
foot down, that is when you feel what 616 horsepower really feels like.
What about on the Las Vegas Strip?
Trifle too obvious perhaps?
3 days ago in San Francisco, I have to say it feels like
about 3 weeks ago, I thought this car would probably come across as a jack
of all trades.
Not as good- looking as some in the class nor as fun to
drive as some others.
I guess you could say that's the case.
What this amazing journey of nearly 1000 miles has taught me is that although it may
not lead the class in any individual area, across the whole broad spectrum
of abilities out there in the reasonably real world, it is a fantastically
capable car.
One thing I did not expect, right now faced with going
back to England, this is a car I'm going to miss.