The world’s most famous secret agent gets the keys to Bentley’s refreshed Continental GT. Road Test Editor HOWARD WALKER is shaken and stirred.
Delve into your dog-eared copies of Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale or Live and Let Die and you’ll see that his suave master spy, James Bond, didn’t always pilot a sleek, sexy Aston Martin.
Like the proper Englishman he was, he drove a Bentley.
According to Fleming, 007’s Bentley was a massive battleship gray 1933 convertible powered by a supercharged 4.5-liter engine that he bought used. Probably out of the London Times’ classifieds.
While the silver screen 007 will always, in my mind, be joined at the hip with an Aston – Sean Connery getting shaken and stirred in that silver 1964 DB5 in Goldfinger was the best – it’s nice to see that Bond, at least in book-form, is back in a Bentley.
The latest James Bond romp – Carte Blanche, by American mystery writer Jeffery Deaver and commissioned by the Ian Fleming estate – has 007 behind the wheel of the very latest 2012 Bentley Continental GT.
This is the newly-facelifted version of Bentley’s most-successful model ever – since its debut in 2003, Bentley has sold over 22,000. For 2012, it comes with edgier styling, more power for outrunning the bad guys, less weight, more gadgets and even more class. In other words, the perfect car for Bond.
Naturally, in the interests of in-depth journalistic research, I felt it my duty to call up Bentley’s equivalent of Miss Moneypenny and request that a new $192,495 Continental be delivered pronto. At a quick glance, this latest version appears little changed from the original. Same gorgeous, swoopy coupe profile, same hulking shoulders over the rear wheels, same quad-light, mesh grille face.
But everything has, in fact, changed. The creases are sharper, the lines tauter and more defined, and the complete body made more aerodynamic. If you’re especially eagle-eyed, you might notice that the GT’s trademark grille is more upright and the main headlights bigger in size. But you probably won’t.
Open those massive barn doors and you’ll see brand new, more supportive seats with to-die-for hand-stitched quilted leather covers. They’ve also been re-shaped at the back to give a much-needed extra couple of inches of rear-seat knee room.
The big interior change, however, comes with the new eight-inch touchscreen that delivers sharper, crisper map imagery, and touch controls for everything from heating and cooling, to the GT’s new 30-gig hard-drive for the optional, ear-bleeding 11-speaker Naim audiophile system.
Pop the hood – or better still, peruse the spec sheet – and you’ll discover that the Continental’s flex-fuel 6.0-liter W-12 powerplant receives an extra 15 horsepower to take the tally up to a whopping 567. More useful in daily driving is the additional 37 pound-feet of muscle, taking the torque factor up to a stump-uprooting level. The Space Shuttle had less power!
And in the development process, the Jenny Craigs at Bentley HQ rightly put the 5,200-pound GT on a crash diet, shedding a full 143 pounds in the process. Add to that, new software for the six-speed automatic which halves shift times to a blink-of-an-eye 200 milliseconds, and this new Conti is livelier and more agile than ever.
I could tell you those fewer pounds and extra horses transform the performance of this new Bentley. They don’t. Fact is, the old Continental GT was always ferociously fast and brutally powerful. This new one compresses you back in the seat like a Lear Jet on take-off just as the original did.
It still, for me, defies physics that something this XL-sized coupe can catapult itself towards the horizon so efficiently and elegantly. For the record, it now lunges from standstill to 60-mph in a supercar-like 4.4 seconds, and doesn’t quit till its speedometer needle is kissing the 198-mph mark!
But the car definitely feels more agile. And a lot of this has to do with the painstaking suspension tweaking that has sharpened the handling without compromising the car’s magic carpet ride quality. That, and the new 40/60 torque split with the GT’s all-wheel-drive system that reduces the previous car’s at-the-limit understeer.
The Continental GT has always been a magical car to drive, and this latest version simply confirms the Bentley’s status as the world’s greatest Grand Tourer.
Here are the keys to your new Bentley, Mr. Bond. You only live twice, so enjoy!
For more information about the latest Bentley models, please visit, http://www.bentleymotors.com/