Orig Msrp $218,265; Silver Tempest/beluga; Piano Black Veneer on 2040-cars

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2014 Bentley Flying Spur

Redefining Super Luxury On A Shrinking Planet
Anyone on Earth with access to the Internet, a television or radio for the last 20 years knows that China is no longer the poor stronghold for strict Communist ideals that it was for much of the 20th Century. (Well, at least not in some places.) Traveling to China twice in less than a month - first to Shanghai for a very international auto show and now to Beijing to drive and review the 2014 Bentley Flying Spur - I've learned that there's no lack of personal wealth, at least in two of the world's largest cities.
And yet, even I think the scene before me is a little bit ridiculous. Here I am, slowly climbing up a hillside to reach a fortification at something called Zhuanduo Pass, where roughly a dozen pristine examples of Western decadence sit idling their hand-built 12-cylinder engines in the shadow of China's revered and awesome Great Wall. Not five kilometers south of here, I'd passed an old man in traditional all-black garb, literally carrying a bundle of sticks on his back from one side of a village to the other. Now as I look through the snug-fitting and silent side glass of the my $200,000+ palace on wheels, I'm more apt to see fat German tourists crisping in the hot Chinese sun while blowing the equivalent of an average Chinese monthly paycheck on lunch and a few Great Wall souvenirs.

2019 Bentley Continental GT: High fashion at its best

The new 2019 Bentley Continental GT has been revealed, and it is a stunner. It shows a healthy influence from the brand's recent show cars, especially the EXP 10 Speed 6. This is a very positive thing. Whereas the exterior of the second-generation car looked exactly like that of the first, the new car sports fresh surfacing that is at once more elegant and more athletic, while also delighting in technical detailing that deepens upon second and third glance. The styling of a six-figure, ultra-luxury Grand Tourer must evolve slowly for a number of reasons. Their wealthy buyers – looking for a prime valet spot at the country club more than at the night club – tend to be a bit more conservative in their tastes than those in the market for a knife-edged exotic. They also prefer their recently purchased six-figure, ultra-luxury Grand Tourer not to be rendered irrelevant in the status game by the introduction of a radically differentiated new model. This is especially true for Bentley and its Continental GT. This model, launched back in 2004, though tracing its roots back much further, brought the company's design out of the anachronistically (if delightfully) baroque and into the aerodynamically imposing modern era. It was the first true 21st century Bentley, decades ahead of the neoclassic design it replaced while faithfully harkening back to cues from the marque's venerable history, especially its long flanking body line, and conspicuous rear haunches. It immediately became Bentley's best seller, a position it has maintained until this year, when it's been outsold slightly by the gauche and indistinct Bentayga SUV. We believe this error will correct once the new GT is available. Much of the success of the design comes from its transference to a platform shared with the new Porsche Panamera. The previous-generation Continentals were built on underpinnings originally created for the VW Phaeton, a configuration that was, at heart, front-drive with all-wheel-drive capabilities, packaging that required engine placement ahead of the front axle. This new stablemate has a rear-wheel-drive bias, allowing for more traditional and gracious grand touring proportions on the surface. It reflects the movement of the engine farther back on the chassis, with a long hood and more hunkered-down and planted rear. We detect luscious shades of 1960s Ferrari Superfast cues in this tapering front-to-rear, side-to-side and along the flanks.

Gliding on the ice at Bentley's fantasy camp

It was just before 2:00 PM when I landed in Helsinki, bleary-eyed and more than slightly disoriented, after a late-night departure from New York and an early-morning connection in Amsterdam. I was staring at the departures board. There was one more flight to go before I could join Bentley for Power on Ice, its annual ice driving experience in the northerly town of Kuusamo, but there was a problem: There were two HEL-KAO flights on the board, both slated to leave at 4:30, and it was impossible to discern which was Bentley's chartered flight to the alpine ski area. Nonplussed and unable to utter a word in Finnish, I approached a gate agent with rudimentary English to see if she knew which flight was mine. "I'm sorry, sir," she said in an Finnish take on the Omaha dialect, "Your plane does not seem to exist." I winced. Of course it didn't. "My" plane was way out on the tarmac, far away from proletariat jumbo jets, accessible only through a gate that the automaker had staffed and commandeered for the afternoon. It was an auspicious start to three days of attending Bentley's exclusive fantasy camp for its affluent super-fans, which purportedly exists to answer the question: What can you give the Bentley fan who already has everything? For drivers more accustomed to making graceful entries and exits in their posh vehicles, several days of power sliding on a private track more than suffices. You need not be a Bentley owner to participate in the program, but an aficionado of the brand with some cash burning a pretty big hole in the pocket. For the better part of a decade, Bentley has decamped to Kuusamo, the town located just south of the Arctic Circle, to prove the British performance bona-fides of its lineup on 19 square miles of frozen Kuusamojarvi lake, as part of the wintertime Power on Ice event. The program satisfies the need of high-end performance enthusiasts who want something different than arriving at another five-star hotel for another weekend of good eating, drinking, and relaxing. Plenty of brands assert that they have a bespoke answer for discerning customers, but Power on Ice is truly different. You need not be a Bentley owner to participate in the program, but an aficionado of the brand with some cash burning a pretty big hole in the pocket.