Bentley Continental GT Mulliner - long-term review

Top Gear’s Bentley Continental GT Mulliner has a sister car. It’s also painted Bedford Grey, upholstered with weatherproofed Oxblood leather. It rides on black wheels and sports a polished chrome grille.

It’s driven by a 6.5-litre straight-six engine originally designed to power an aircraft, delivering just over 200 horsepower. It has a handbrake lever mounted on the outside of its bodywork, tyres narrower than you’d find on a medium-sized motorbike, and depends on piffling drum brakes to stop all 1.5 tonnes of it.

It’s a classic, a relic, a complete antique. Yet this exquisite Speed Six is every bit as fresh and modern as the Continental GT. It’s only three years old.

Yes, it’s one of Bentley’s £1.5 million continuation series cars – an exacting replica of the original 1920s racecar. A fully certified Bentley, built by craftspeople, to provide wealthy enthusiasts with the opportunity they couldn’t have dreamt of – to spec, own and compete in a works-pedigree example of an endurance racing legend, 100 years after it was state of the art.

This particular car isn’t one of the 12-strong production run. It’s the factory’s hard-working test mule. It’s put in the hard yards as a development prototype, and just occasionally, they wheel it out for absolute rank amateurs to have a go in. You might be able to sense where I’m about to enter the story.

We’re at Oulton Park in Cheshire, a stone’s throw from Bentley’s Crewe factory. The original Speed Six never raced here – because this challenging, flowing track wasn’t consecrated until the mid-1950s. I’m here to find out how difficult it is to drive a racing car from several generations earlier, when the motor car itself was barely old enough to vote. When safety equipment was a leather cap and goggles, and a pit stop included a glass of brandy for the driver. And a smoke.

My teacher is Mike from Bentley’s press department, who’s a dab hand at coaxing the best from this eccentric machine and – because he deals with journalists day-to-day – blessed with a generously deep well of patience.

“Ever driven a car with no synchromesh?” he asks cheerfully.

“Er... no. Sorry.”

“No problem. It’s properly tough – you won’t be able to break it,” he says confidently, leaping aboard to show me the ropes. “Essentially, you’re aiming to match the road-speed – the speed the wheels are spinning – to the engine revs.”

At least, I think that’s what he said. He’s bellowing from behind a Bentley-liveried full-face helmet over a din that sounds like a squadron of Hawker Hurricanes scrambling for a sortie. And flawlessly executing the prescribed technique as he instructs.

It 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, he admits, is trickier. It needs a hefty dollop of throttle, sort of like a heel-and-toe downshift with no mechanical sympathy. “A modern car likes a blip. This needs a squeeeeeeze,” Mike advises.

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

It’s a truly magnificent beast, the Speed Six. And what’s more, they’re not garage queens. Crazy owners are racing them. I hear that in certain parts of the world where the police are perhaps more, um, sympathetic… they may even venture onto the road from time to time. Couldn’t condone that sort of behaviour, mind you. You wouldn’t want to be behind me at a stop light.