2005 Bentley Continental Gt Coupe 2-door 6.0l on 2040-cars

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Bentley reserves 99 Continental GT3-Rs for North America at $337k apiece

Whether they're powered by V8 or W12 engines, the Bentley Continental GT just keeps getting faster and faster. The new Continental GT Speed, for example, is the fastest road-going Bentley ever made, capable of reaching 206 miles per hour. And the Continental GT3-R is the quickest-accelerating Bentley yet, capable of hitting 60 in just 3.6 seconds.
In other words, if you want to get your hands on one, you'll need to act fast. Bentley is only making 300 examples of the GT3-R, but while it is said to have already sold out the entire production run, it has been kind enough to keep 99 examples on the side just for the North American market.
The road-going embodiment of the Continental GT3 racer, the GT3-R packs a 4.0-liter twin-turbo V8 tuned up to 572 horsepower and 516 pound-feet of torque. That makes it 72 hp and 29 lb-ft stronger than the base Continental GT V8, or 43 hp and 14 lb-ft more muscular than the GT V8 S, about on par with the W12 model but 54 hp and 89 lb-ft shy of the latest GT Speed. But thanks to its lighter weight (inherent in the eight-cylinder model and stripped of a further 220 pounds in the GT3-R), it trounces them all in the sprint to 60.

Bentley rolls out special Birkin edition Mulsanne in Europe

While focus in the automotive industry this week is undeniably on the Detroit Auto Show and the North American market, Bentley has introduced a new special edition overseas based on the Mulsanne.
Named after Sir Henry "Tiger" Tim Birkin, one of the legendary Bentley Boys of the 1920s and '30s, the Mulsanne Birkin Edition upgrades on Crewe's flagship limousine with some unique touches. Available in Ghost White, Damson burgundy or a two-tone Fountain Blue and Dark Sapphire paintjob, the Birkin Mulsanne features unique 21-inch wheels, special tread plates, a unique Flying B logos stitched into the headrests and inlaid into the dashboard and rear picnic tables.
Each of the 22 examples to be made will also come with a custom luggage set and comes standard with the optional Mulliner Driving Specification and upgraded entertainment system with twin 8-inch LCDs in the seatbacks, DVD player, wifi hotspot, Naim audio system and integrated iPads. Bentley hasn't announced pricing for the special European model, but if there were ever an example of "if you have to ask, you can't afford it," surely this is it.

A car writer's year in new vehicles [w/video]

Christmas is only a week away. The New Year is just around the corner. As 2014 draws to a close, I'm not the only one taking stock of the year that's we're almost shut of. Depending on who you are or what you do, the end of the year can bring to mind tax bills, school semesters or scheduling dental appointments. For me, for the last eight or nine years, at least a small part of this transitory time is occupied with recalling the cars I've driven over the preceding 12 months. Since I started writing about and reviewing cars in 2006, I've done an uneven job of tracking every vehicle I've been in, each year. Last year I made a resolution to be better about it, and the result is a spreadsheet with model names, dates, notes and some basic facts and figures. Armed with this basic data and a yen for year-end stories, I figured it would be interesting to parse the figures and quantify my year in cars in a way I'd never done before. The results are, well, they're a little bizarre, honestly. And I think they'll affect how I approach this gig in 2015. {C} My tally for the year is 68 cars, as of this writing. Before the calendar flips to 2015 it'll be as high as 73. Let me give you a tiny bit of background about how automotive journalists typically get cars to test. There are basically two pools of vehicles I drive on a regular basis: media fleet vehicles and those available on "first drive" programs. The latter group is pretty self-explanatory. Journalists are gathered in one location (sometimes local, sometimes far-flung) with a new model(s), there's usually a day of driving, then we report back to you with our impressions. Media fleet vehicles are different. These are distributed to publications and individual journalists far and wide, and the test period goes from a few days to a week or more. Whereas first drives almost always result in a piece of review content, fleet loans only sometimes do. Other times they serve to give context about brands, segments, technology and the like, to editors and writers. So, adding up the loans I've had out of the press fleet and things I've driven at events, my tally for the year is 68 cars, as of this writing. Before the calendar flips to 2015, it'll be as high as 73. At one of the buff books like Car and Driver or Motor Trend, reviewers might rotate through five cars a week, or more. I know that number sounds high, but as best I can tell, it's pretty average for the full-time professionals in this business.