STEPHEN BAYLEY

The Aesthete

The story of our cars is, to an extent, the story of our lives. Each involves journeys. Mine began in a dusty blue ’65 Cortina with a column change and a bench seat. The oil-pressure light was always blinking, so I obscured it with gaffer tape. Of course, times change. I used to go to Liverpool’s Smithdown Road chippy after school. Now I go to Richard Caring’s Sexy Fish in Mayfair, although not with the same enthusiasm. And outside my house there is a glowering Bentley Continental GT Speed, painted according to my dark grey taste. How is this to be read? ‘To know his cars was to know him,’ the obituary in The

Times said of WO Bentley in 1971. So that’s one thing we have in common: the things we choose and use tell stories about us. He had his own journey too, from Cricklewood to Crewe.

A refined man, his was a personality nonetheless formed by an apprenticeship with hot and greasy steam trains. In the autobiography, WO describes a heroic round trip from London to Leeds on a swaying and lurching GNR footplate. Here he shovelled seven tons of coal in less than a day to cover 400 miles, a statistic that puts even the impressive fuel consumption of my Bentley into humbling perspective.

To quibble about the Bentley’s thirst is like rebuking a fish for living in water. It’s really not the point. But what exactly is? Well, one thing would be the oceanic sense of potent authority which great iconography and a very big engine provide. A Car & Driver journalist described the 1966 Chevrolet Corvette with its new 427 V8: ‘There’s power literally everywhere, great gobs of steamlocomotive, earth-moving torque.’ That’s a line I so wish I had written about the Bentley.

And going about its earth-moving way, the Continental is a car that appears both raffish and solemn, an incongruous combination I enjoy and am working on replicating myself, even if the car does not confer those values on me first. Le style est l’homme. And the car as well. Sure, it can feel a little cumbersome, but Gloriana is not an ocean-racer.

WO Bentley gave the Continental name to cars suited to romantic, long-distance European driving: the superb ’52 R-Type was the original, followed by the S-series of ’55. Five years after Volkswagen’s 1998 takeover, the new Continental arrived, with a second, slightly more sculpted, generation in 2011. Seductive dreams of travel were planted on the Volkswagen Group’s D1 platform.

As WO intended, I have driven Continentals mostly in Europe. I took an early one to Paris and people gawped from the trottoir. In Reims I went to stay with Jacquesson Champagne and on arrival people rose from the cellars, gathered in the courtyard and clapped. Later, an overnight trip from London to Nice astonished me because I didn’t think I could ever drive at a steady 140mph. Of course, some people mocked the Continental as a Phaeton at a $100,000 premium, but that’s like calling the ur-Porsche a Beetle. Some forms of cannibalism have nobility. I like the Continental extremely, but not everyone agrees: that distinctive iconography can be troublesome. A writer well known to this magazine frowned when I told him about my new car. ‘I’ve got a problem with the Bentley brand,’ he said, meaning, I think, that the wrong sort of people were in the Continental market. That’s a bit simpliste. My reply was that Neapolitan gangsters wear Rubinacci suits, but that’s not going to stop me wearing them too.

Not every Bentley customer is as fastidious as WO himself, but they often respect the powerful mystique. Kim Kardashian quite rightly says: ‘You don’t put bumper stickers on a Bentley.’ I can think of no more exquisite expression of aesthetic sensibility. And the rapper Slim Thug chimes in: ‘I always say if you can’t buy it three times over, you can’t afford it. Don’t drive a Bentley on a Benz income.’ Perhaps Slim Thug has yo-da-man-slap-my-bitch bumper stickers on his S-class.

The powertrain of my Bentley weighs, I am told, 1.2 tonnes. I suspect the doors alone weigh as much as a Daewoo Matiz. They are certainly more beautiful. Of course, it’s heavy, extreme, absurd, expensive, irresponsible and anachronistic: ‘ridin’ dirty’, as Mr Slim Thug might say. But these are the same qualities that make a Continental Speed intoxicatingly, addictively magnificent. The other night, I stepped from my Speed into an Audi A5 and it felt as insubstantial and underbred as a minicab. Friends, we have to acknowledge the bitter-sweet truth that the most wonderful cars are fast becoming things of the past.

‘THE CONTINENTAL IS BOTH RAFFISH AND SOLEMN, A COMBINATION I AM WORKING ON REPLICATING MYSELF’