HAND-HEWN PRECISION THAT CAN MAKE HASTE
Exquisite luxury married to an effortless, weightless ride — this is Bentley at the top of its game, writes Lorraine Sommerfeld.
There’s a scene in Downton Abbey, the show that allowed the great unwashed to peer through the keyhole of an aristocratic life they could only aim to serve but never share, where Lady Mary smirks at her future husband’s newest acquisition and declares it a “snappy little chariot.”
The car? A 1927 Bentley 3 Litre. Snappy little chariot, indeed. Even a TV show had the good sense to show the car being raced, for that is the bloodline of Bentleys. With the 2017 launch of the brand’s crown jewel, the Mulsanne, come three chariots destined for today’s one percenters, be they royalty or rappers.
The Mulsanne Signature, the Mulsanne Speed and the Mulsanne Extended Wheel Base all feature Bentley’s famed 6¾-litre twin-turbo V8 engine. The trio of models aims to cover markets exploding in places such as South Korea, Asia and the Middle East while still hewing close to a historical market. In each of the past three years, Bentley has moved 10,000 units worldwide; it’s ahead of that pace this year, and Bentley believes the Mulsanne trio will nicely augment the success enjoyed by its entry into the SUV market with the Bentayga.
Bentley excels at bespoke luxury. But it also makes a car so quick, so smooth and so silent it will take your breath away. Like some supernatural tendril pulling on your right foot, you’re doing 270 km/h and you’ve never even felt the transmission shift. On one of Germany’s famed unlimited highways, I unfurled the Speed’s 530 horsepower, the 811 lb.-ft of torque ziplining effortlessly across the band. As an occupant, it’s like you’re suspended in mid-air. As a driver, the car feels weightless. We’re told it does zero to 100 km/h in 4.8 seconds. I’m sure it does.
Outside tweaks are subtle; newly designed headlights retain their traditional Bentley round shape, but have been horizontally aligned. The distinctive vertical grille has been squared up, and is wider. The front end is bolder and cleaner, and the rear lights sign a subtle red “B.” The real Mulsanne news is the Extended Wheel Base, with 250 millimetres added to the passenger area. If you’re going to drop a rumoured $400,000 to be driven about, this is the way to go. The interior design team, under Brett Boydell, has turned the rear compartment into a ridiculously luxe cockpit. “In a Bentley, leather is leather, wood is wood, and metal is metal,” he says, and the 400 man-hours required in each build show it. There are 480 leather parts in that interior, formed from 24 hides. Twelve veneers are mirror-matched when the length of a section exceeds the natural length of the split.
New seats steal from the highest peaks of the airline industry and recline and extend. Ten-inch tablets are removable from the back of the forward seats, privacy curtains zip shut at the press of a button, ashtrays feature more chrome than the car in my driveway and there is a champagne fridge. Of course there is.
The middle console conceals a pop-up table that folds up and out, and can be halved. The intricate mechanism is an absolute work of art containing 761 parts. Adjust the seat, tilt the table, hook up the Wi-Fi and you’ll wonder why you even have an office. Not to be outdone by the design gurus at work on the interior, the engineers have pushed hard to create that cocoon. Five thousand, eight-hundred individual welds — though it’s playing Where’s Waldo to try to find any of them — make the Mulsanne an absolute block of hand-hewn precision.
Upgrades include better rear springs, hydraulically damped subframe bushings and active engine mounts to reduce interior noise. When Bentley achieved all this, it noticed the tires throwing back road noise so those, too, have been tricked out, with “advanced foam architecture” snipping another four decibels from the interior.
Bentley aims to wed a luxurious ride to an exuberant drive experience. Unwilling to forfeit one to achieve the other, the 2017 Mulsannes showcase the best of Bentley. The problems are good to have: keeping that speed down is near impossible as it whiskers up undetected; I’m uncertain if I’d rather drive the car or ride in the back; and if I’m dropping all that money, I’m not sure if I want something a little more obvious, more obnoxious.
What a Lady Mary dilemma to have.
The Mulsanne Signature will start at $335,100 here in Canada, the Speed will go from $369,200, while the Extended Wheel Base will be in the $400,000 range.
Bentley excels at bespoke luxury. But it also makes a car so quick, so smooth and so silent it will take your breath away.