Bentley Azure, Very Clean Original Collector Car. on 2040-cars

Auto blog

Daily Driver: 2015 Bentley Continental GT Speed

Daily Driver videos are micro-reviews of vehicles in the Autoblog press fleet, featuring impressions from the staffers that drive them every day. Today's Daily Driver features the 2015 Bentley Continental GT Speed coupe, reviewed by Steven Ewing. With a starting price of $235,000, it's not what you'd typically consider a "daily driver," but as we find out, this Bentley is indeed a car you could happily live with every single day. You can watch the video above or read a transcript below. Watch more Autoblog videos at /videos. VIDEO TRANSCRIPT [00:00:00] Hey, guys. This is senior editor Steven Ewing with another Daily Driver video. I'm in a car today that you wouldn't necessarily consider to be a daily driver by the normal logic. I'm driving the $235,000 2015 Bentley Continental GT Speed Coupe. Now, as its name would suggest with the word "speed" in there at the end, this is an incredibly powerful and incredibly quick car. [00:00:30] It's powered by a 6.0-liter twin-turbo W12 engine that makes about 626 horsepower and about 606 pound-feet of torque. As you can see, it is a seriously quick car. 0 to 60 is estimated to happen in about four seconds, and this thing will top out at over 205 miles per hour. It's not just the off the line acceleration, [00:01:00] it's how much power is available while you're already at speed. I'm on the freeway right now and just with a light tap of the throttle there's just this massive wave of torque that comes on. It's just smooth, seamless, it's effortless. It's really, really fun. You can really get it going hot into a corner, let it hug it, and it really just grips. It's got a ton of power. [00:01:30] It's a really nice-handling car. A lot of people tend to think of Bentleys as being cars that you're driven in. You picture a Mulsanne pulling up with a chauffeur, but that's not the case with the Continental. In fact, Bentley's done a lot of work in recent years to drive home the point that the Continental is the driver's car. You look at things like the GT V8 S, which is one of my favorite Bentleys they've ever produced, where it's a car that despite its heft and its size and all of that, it's [00:02:00] still pretty involving. The chassis tuning is really good. The steering's pretty good. It's actually a good to drive car. On top of that, it's incredibly quiet in here.

Ford Mustang Shelby GT350R named Road & Track Performance Car of the Year

With a 526-horsepower, 5.2-liter V8 that roars to 8,250 rpm, it's really hard to consider the 2016 Ford Shelby Mustang GT350R an underdog in any fight. However, the Shelby held the lowest as-tested price and was only middle of the pack in terms of power in Road & Track's 2016 Performance Car of the Year challenge. The 'Stang's numbers clearly didn't tell the whole story about the potent coupe because Ford's muscle car grabbed the title in this year's test. A model needs to be new or significantly updated to be eligible for the honor, and R&T found an impressive slate of eight candidates this year. The challengers included the Bentley Continental GT3-R, Cadillac ATS-V Coupe, Chevrolet Corvette Z06, Dodge Viper ACR, Mercedes-AMG GT S, and Porsche Cayman GT4. The Ferrari 488 GTB was the most expensive of the bunch with an as-tested price of $347,942, which is five times more than the Shelby. Once the group was together, R&T hustled them over curving roads and on the National Corvette Museum Motorsports Park. There was a lot to love about the Shelby, even in this impressive crew. "With a flat-plane crank and Sport Cup 2 tires, the GT350R is a Mustang turned up to 11," editor-in-chief Larry Webster said in the announcement of the results. The GT350R joins some great company. Past winners include the Porsche 911 GT3 last year and the Corvette in 2013. For some fantastic photography and the complete appraisal of these performance machines check out R&T's website for the full story. Related Video: ROAD & TRACK NAMES THE FORD MUSTANG SHELBY GT350R THE 2016 PERFORMANCE CAR OF THE YEAR New York, NY (November 9, 2015) – Road & Track today named the Ford Mustang Shelby GT350R the 2016 Performance Car of the Year, beating out seven of the world's best new sports cars. The article appears in the December/January issue, on newsstands November 17, and on RoadandTrack.com. "With a flat-plane crank and Sport Cup 2 tires, the GT350R is a Mustang turned up to 11," said Larry Webster, editor-in-chief of Road & Track. "Not only does the car have soul and harness so much firepower with such ease, but the real achievement here is that it's so approachable. It's a car you can't help but love." The Mustang Shelby GT350R was the winner by a runaway vote.

Bentley to retire aging 6.75-liter V8 with current Mulsanne

The massive 6.75-liter V8 in the Bentley Mulsanne is one of the oldest engines still in production. But it may not be around for much longer. According to Car and Driver, Bentley intends to finally put the big old pushrod V8 to pasture once the current Mulsanne is phased out, thus putting an end to a saga that goes back some 57 years. Powerful as it may be, ever-stricter exhaust emissions and fuel-consumption regulations will see that the L Series V8, originally introduced way back in 1957, doesn't stay in production forever. Whenever the Mulsanne is replaced, it will reportedly get a brand-new twelve-cylinder engine. Bentley is currently the world's largest producer of dozen-pot powerplants. Production of the British automaker's 6.0-liter twin-turbo W12 far outpaces anything from Rolls-Royce, Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Ferrari, or Lamborghini. Over the decades since its introduction, Bentley's long-serving V8 has gone from making an "adequate" amount of power and torque to an impressive 530 horsepower and a positively massive 811 pound-feet (with the help of a couple of turbochargers). Its eventual discontinuation wouldn't be the first attempt on the life of the 6.75-liter engine. When BMW briefly took control of both Rolls and Bentley, it replaced the big engine by a smaller 4.4-liter V8. Customer demand led Bentley to bring the old engine back. It will likely be some time before we get details of Bentley's next powerplant. Models like the Mulsanne and Rolls-Royce Phantom tend to stick around for a long time, and the latest version of Bentley's flagship was just released earlier this year. Related Video: