Bentley Speed Six review

Controlling the Speed Six is an abject lesson in brain/hand/foot co-ordination. Principally because the gearbox, in period-correct fashion, has no synchromesh, so it’s up to the driver to match road speed to engine speed. Sounds easy.

It also looks perfectly simple written down. Lift the throttle, dip the clutch, select neutral. Dip the clutch again, and positively select the next gear. Coming down the ‘box is trickier. It needs a hefty dollop of throttle, sort of like a heel-and-toe downshift with no mechanical sympathy.

But I could write instructions on how to juggle, or a recipe for the perfect crème brulee. Executing it is a different matter. Easier said than done and all that.

I am hopeless. Utterly, grindingly useless. Namby-pamby millennial-features here has been spoiled by a decade and a half of driving modern power-assisted-everything cars. So I simply don’t possess the combination of timing, technique and brute strength required to wrestle the heavy, shoulder-wrenching steering while remembering the process for grabbing second. It takes me a whole lap of Oulton Park to nail an upshift without graunching the gears. Another two laps before second-to-third becomes second-nature. Ish.

Fluking my first downshift lulls me into a wholly false sense I’ve mastered the Six. Nope. I’m daintily blipping the throttle like it’s a 911 S/T, instead of treading on the throttle like it’s the stodgy clutch in a Lamborghini Countach. So, the engine barely notices the application of throttle, the four-speed gearbox stubbornly refuses to acknowledge the shift. I get flustered, mis-time the clutch dip, and we roll to a stop to begin again.

Having to come to a complete stop in order to successful change down gears is fairly inconvenient so far as, y’know, driving a racing car goes. This is what separates the men from the Bentley Boys.

Luckily, the Six trumpets out such colossal torque it can manage a whole lap in fourth, and it’s so unburstably tough it’d also complete a full tour just in first. And it sounds like a low-revving bomber from a WW2 documentary.

So I can at least keep having try after try, rushing through the autumn breeze, suffering a palm friction burn from the steering wheel.