Big, Bad Bentley

Flying Spur is the perfect land yacht for showing off to the masses.

The trouble we poor underpaid scribes have with evaluating a rolling boudoir like Bentley’s new Flying Spur is that, once ensconced in the sway of its hedonistic leather, we are transformed, as many of you might, into giddy 7-year-olds. Suddenly, we have people we need to impress, ancient scores to settle and an insecurity complex to assuage. Petulance reigns, bonhomie disappears and our inner juvenile seeks revenge for the day that rich kid — you know the one — lorded his new Willie Mays signature bat or Gretzky-approved carbon-fibre hockey stick over our then-less fortunate selves.

Compensation, gearhead style, can come in many forms, especially if you have, say, something like said Bentley Flying Spur at your disposal for a long weekend. One could, for instance, spend the entire weekend dressed in your tattiest motorcycle jacket and worn Doc Martens in memoriam of your favourite iconoclast, Lewis Allan Reed, valet parking in front of the very trendiest hot spots and making sure the big Bentley’s 1,100-watt stereo is blaring New Sensations. Ideally, Lou would be sardonically crooning “I love that [Kawasaki] GPz so much I could kiss her” just as the hoi polloi turns to see who has arrived.

Or one could take the more traditional route, namely phoning up every one of your long-ignored cousins and simply leaving a cryptic “Bentley. Flying Spur. 616 horsepower. $250,000!” message on their answering machine without so much as leaving your name because you know that, like most people, they don’t have any other cousins in the road-testing biz with access to a brand-new-for-2014 Bentley.

Of course, this being the digital age, technology allows that lording over those lesser can now be accomplished on a larger, more efficient scale. A simple snap of the iPhone 5 to your Twitter feed and you’re sending “Me and my Bentley #FlyingSpur #Breitlingtimekeeper #EatYourHeartOut” to millions — OK hundreds — of followers.

Whatever your choice of expression — and for we, the particularly shallow, perhaps all three — it still all comes down to the fact that, deep down, we all have a juvenile need to impress. Oh, those more accustomed to exorbitance might not be nearly as overt about their vengeful joy, but no one drives a big black land yacht with tinted windows and brightly polished rims the size of manhole covers trying not to get noticed. A Bentley may be more subtle than a bright red Lamborghini Gallardo, but make no mistake, the message is still the same: Nana-Nana, Boo-Boo.

Besides its sheer presence, of course, the Bentley has much to recommend it as a tool for revenge. For instance, those particularly malicious could take their victim out for a ride, no matter how much they might protest that “they don’t really care about cars,” for wafting along on the magic carpet ride that is a 2014 Flying Spur is not something quickly forgotten, even for those professing an eternal love for mass transit.

The big Bentley is incredibly serene. One doesn’t hear much of t he road in the Flying Spur, an inordinate amount of its hefty 2,475 kilograms seemingly devoted to sound-

deadening material. And, in complete opposition to the norm in the luxury segment, Bentley has actually softened the suspension of the Flying Spur significantly for 2014. Imagine flying along on a cloud. Yes, over the potholes that Toronto calls roads. Everyone — and as you might imagine from the preceding, there were many — whom I generously gave rides to commented on the incredible compliance of its suspension.

Which is kind of odd in a way since Bentley also dumped the higher-horsepower Continental GT Speed version of its 6.0-litre W12 into the Flying Spur this year and one doesn’t usually up the horsepower of a car by 64 hp while simultaneously softening suspension by some 20%.

But it somehow all works. One quick spurt — 100 kilometres an hour takes but four and a half seconds — of all its 616 horses is all it took to put a lascivious smile on all the victims, um, friends I took for rides. Indeed, while the cabin’s serenity had said prey all praising the Spur’s subtlety, a quick rush through the Flying Spur’s seven gears had them giggling maniacally. That something so large, so incredibly comfortable can also do a fair impression of a moon rocket is the stuff that makes lording one’s prosperity so very worthwhile.

Of course, the Bentley fairly bristles with the niceties of wealth: supple leather adorning pretty much everything in the cabin, chrome buttonry of the old school, a Breitling chronometer adorning the centre of the dashboard. But the Flying Spur’s modernities are appreciated in equal measure. The navigation system is positively simple to use. Ditto for Bluetoothing your cellphone. And mine was but the basest of Bentleys with virtually no options and certainly none of the custom bespoke items that Bentley will conjure up to satisfy the rich and vengeful. Indeed, short of an actual moon rocket, there’s probably nothing the Crewe factory won’t customize into your Bentley.

That said, not everything is perfect with the Bentley, of course. I suspect that Volkswagen’s now-aging W12 may be reaching the limits of its development. For those of you unfamiliar with this odd cylinder arrangement, the Flying Spur is essentially two Volkswagen VR6 narrow-angle V6s mounted to a common crankshaft to form a widely spaced W. It’s a dense if not quite perfectly balanced affair and I suspect that it is reaching the structural limits. When calling on all 616 of those turbocharged horses, for instance, one can hear just the faintest of grumblings from the powertrain. The hoi polloi won’t notice, but you might be in trouble if one of those who scorn you is a powertrain engineer. I suspect that Bentley will be placing less emphasis on its top-of-theline W12 in the future. It’s a heavy beast, and faced with the penalties levied on those profligate in their consumption, even Bentley will have to sell more cars with fewer cylinders and less displacement. The good news is that the alternative is a tweaked version of Audi’s supremely refined twin-turbocharged V8, which is lighter, powerful and sufficiently more frugal to prove politically correct. Even those who might ostensibly rule occasionally have to bow to the power of the masses.