‘Pointy, light, alive and addictive like Ja a Cakes’

A week ago I drove Bentley’s 2019 Conti GT Pikes Peak record breaker, and my body’s just in the final phase of recovery; the hum’s fading in my ears, super unleaded is no longer ever-present on my palate and my heart rate’s just dipped back under 200bpm.

If you haven’t yet treated yourself, search YouTube for ‘Bentley Continental GT Pikes Peak Record’. Rhys Millen’s time of 10:18.488 was fast – eight-seconds-under-the-previous-record fast – but such is the composure of the Bentley’s chassis and the effortless might of its twin-turbo 12 that the run looks calm and composed rather than wild and ragged. It is magnificent to watch; thanks to the car’s straight-through titanium Akrapovic exhaust system, it is also magnificent to listen to.

Inside, the incongruity of the cockpit is excellent. The start button on the familiar centre console still wakes the W12 but you must first prod a few additional red buttons, and the Conti’s driver’s display is lit up like a warning-light Fourth of July. The cockpit – usually a cocoon of butter-soft leathers, unctuous carpet and tactile stitching – is a metal shell chicly dressed with heavy-duty cabling and fuse boxes.

A grimly serious place of work, then? Kinda. While this is undoubtedly a car prepared to do a job (the ESC system defaults to the most laissez-faire and oversteery of the standard settings, and – as in the production car – only a token fraction of the W12’s oceanic torque is sent to the front axle), it is also a car that has you giggling, swearing and jabbering out loud to yourself with hysterical excitement like nothing I’ve driven since Ariel’s Nomad.

First off there’s the noise. The Pikes Peak is extraordinarily loud, urgent and exhilarating, its soundtrack a frenzied shriek of rabid acceleration that’s entirely unlike the demure and cultured standard car. The twin-turbo W12 – never shy, it has to be said – feels monumentally potent here, the torque in particular (which peaks at a gravity-battering 664lb ft and hangs on in there for much of the rev range – witness Millen working the midrange like Gordon Ramsay works a kitchen) helping the Conti gather speed like some nightmarish vision of unchecked physics.

Then you find yourself peeling into a big, dry, empty roundabout and all of a sudden the Conti’s lift-off oversteering like a Peugeot 205 GTI in the rain, you’re catching it without thinking and then, without so much as a threat of understeer – and more than a suggestion of the opposite – you’re leaving said roundabout more in love with an entirely unobtainable car than is probably healthy for long-term happiness. The Pikes Peak car is like no other Bentley I’ve ever driven; rear-biased, pointy, light, alive and addictive like Jaffa Cakes. And if, like me, you’d like to see a little more of the Pikes Peak car in the production Conti GT, the good news is we only need to wait until spring 2021, and a new Continental GT Speed.

Enjoy the issue.