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Friday 18 July 2008

Bentley beauty

Alan Judd goes Motoring

Lucinda Lambton said that driving it was like slicing naked through cream. I’ve never done that (she may have) but when she floored the throttle on the track leading to the Villa Mangiacane, causing the wheels to spurt stones and the rear to slither from port to starboard, I thought she must envisage a kind of eel-like motion. I also remembered she’d had a knee operation and wasn’t sure she could manage braking. Fortunately, traction control and ceramic discs — a £20,000 extra, the largest fitted to any production car — saw us through the wrought-iron gates by a whisker to a relatively sedate stop in the courtyard.

It would have been a pity to reduce the villa to rubble because it was built by Machiavelli’s uncle and has a commanding view towards Florence. There were also two priceless Bentleys parked before it: Old Number One, 8-litre winner of Le Mans and Brooklands and for a while Woolf Barnato’s personal runabout, and Tim Birkin’s 4.5-litre single-seater Blower, which set the Brooklands record of 137.76mph average lap time. Just sitting in those cars puts you in awe of anyone who can drive them; to have competed at those speeds and lived is almost superhuman.

We had our own Brooklands, meanwhile. Not the dirt track, nor the sweeping roads of the hills around Florence, but Bentley’s new 2.7-tonne, 184mph, £230,000 coupé. It’s a beauty, an almost 18ft Leviathan that goes like a Porsche, handles like a Lotus (all right, but you know what I mean) and cradles you like a — well, like a Bentley. Distinguished and varied motoring writers such as the Telegraph’s Andrew English, Autocar’s Steve Sutcliffe and the Sunday Times’s Andrew Frankel all rate it highly. The last, normally no great admirer of the marque, ‘fell for it like no other Bentley built since the original Bentley Motors went bust in 1931’. On brief acquaintance — I hope to get to know it better during the summer — I think it may be the most complete Bentley ever.

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