Bentley ContiGT

REPORT 6 £ 159,900 OTR/£200,345 as tested/£3,000pcm WHY I T ’S HERE

Is living with luxe all it’s cracked up to be? DRI V ER

Ollie Marriage

YOU LISTEN TO STUFF IN YOUR CAR. OF COURSE YOU DO, IT’S WHAT

helps pass the time. So do I, almost exclusively podcasts and audio books. Until the Bentley arrived. It has the Naim Audio system in it. It’s a £6,595 option, so clearly a massive extravagance. Well, until you put it up against the price of other Bentley options. Or the price of other Naim Audio kit. Its top-line Statement system costs more than a Conti GT.

But here’s the thing: it’s fundamentally changed my listening behaviour. I now listen to music rather than spoken word, simply because it sounds so sensational. I’ve run plenty of other cars with top-notch audio in them, but none so good that it’s changed my habits.

Like any specialist UK manufacturing firm, Naim Audio is based around the back of an Argos. Steve Sells is the technical director: “On the first-gen Conti GT we had 15 speakers and 1,100 watts. In your car, there are now 20 speakers and 2,000 watts. There are 746 watts per horsepower so our little box is nearly 3bhp – I did actually work out that’s the equivalent of 500bhp per tonne.”

The Conti GT is a good platform for hi-fi. “Weight helps the microphonics of it. The acoustics too as there’s more damping materials. Really you want the speakers at ear-level, however, all you can fit in the A-pillars are tweeters. But there’s an acoustic trick, because first the ear perceives where sound’s coming from. So you slightly advance the high frequencies coming out of the A-pillars to ‘lift’ the sound.”

On the journey home I pay even more attention than normal to the system, remembering Sells’ words, “We want music to not only be accurately reproduced, but to feel alive and real, to have an emotional connection.” And it does, which is why the Conti GT transports me in two ways.