Bentley Speed Six review

This isn’t a car you climb inside. You mount it, like a gallant cavalry officer about to charge into battle. Strike up to the flank, don’t show fear, place leading foot onto the fixed step and extend other leg across the hardwood floorboards. The seat is plushly stuffed and extremely comfortable. As it should be, for a triple-stint at Le Mans.

Ahead of you is a dashboard completely unlike what you’re used to in a modern car. It’s haphazardly littered with instrumentation for components long extinct in today’s Bentleys. All manner of clock face sizes and fonts jostle for position among the wooden surface (or engine-turned aluminium if you’d prefer). It’s an ergonomic disaster, but fascinating to behold.

The driving position you’ve adopted is one where muscle power counts. This isn’t a car you coax along with wheel lazily threaded betwixt forefinger and thumb. You steer with your shoulders, elbows pointed east-west. You brake with angle, knee and hip all compressing as a team. It’s a full body workout.

Clearly, as a revived 1920s antique, the layout is now what you’re used to. Thankfully the pedals still live in a clutch/brake/accelerator layout, but the handbrake is mounted externally to the fuselage.

There’s ignition timing and fuel mix toggles on the steering wheel hub. But because this machine heralds from an age when the scourge of the touch-sensitive pixel was long off in the future, said controls are all solid, tactile and easy to operate with cold-numbed, oily fingers.

You’ll want to wear a helmet for several reasons, not least is the lack of roll bar (though when the car feels this sure-footed and heavy-set, you’d really have to go some to upset the centre of gravity). Mainly, it’s the headwind, drying your eyes and chapping your skin. The little aero screens deflect the breeze a bit, but even hunched down behind them like a true grizzled Bentley boy.