CHANGING TIMES AT BENTLEY. THE FOURTH-generation Continental GT will be revealed imminently – turn to page 98 for the full story – and it adopts a 770bhp-plus plug-in hybrid V8 powertrain: the next step on Bentley’s stated mission of a fully electrified line-up at the end of the decade. Meanwhile, it’s goodnight from the Crewe firm’s famed W12 engine. The big, smooth, distinctive powerplant has been synonymous with big, smooth, distinctive Bentleys since 2003, but production ended in April after more than 100,000 of the four-bank, 6-litre units had been built. (By the time you read this, production of 4-litre V8 Bentley Continentals and Flying Spurs will have stopped too.)
A timely moment, then, to bid farewell to one of the automotive world’s most singular powerplants by revisiting the car in which the W12 first found a berth: the original Continental GT. And, as the new Conti GT prepares for launch, a timely moment to acknowledge just what a pivotal car the original has been for Bentley. A real before-and-after car, a watershed moment for the brand, it delivered a new audience and vastly increased sales. The reason Bentley is in rude financial health right now – perhaps, even, in existence at all – can be traced back to this car’s launch.
‘We sometimes refer to it as the second revolution of Bentley,’ says Chris Cole, line director for all models atis because although Bentley made some great cars in the long period between the Blowers and VW acquiring the company in 1998, with the synergies and arrangements with Rolls-Royce and different owners through the decades, we sort of fell to the wayside. Some people thought a Bentley was like a version of a Rolls-Royce rather than a brand in its own right. The Continental GT allowed a complete separation from that and allowed us to breathe as a brand.’
