Motoring: Extreme driving

One week, two convertibles. The first, a 40-year-old held together by rust, with doors so warped I’ve taken them off, the windscreen secured by baler twine to keep out the rain when it stands but removed when we go anywhere, no lights, free road tax, cheap insurance, and a first-time starter that does all you ask of it, eventually. Neither old enough to be interesting nor rare enough to be valuable, it is of course my tractor, a Universal, a Romanian Fiat built under licence. It belonged to my father and I paid the man who bought his farm £200 for it.

It is massively overengineered and quite wonderfully slow. On our annual tractor trundle — a three-hour procession of 60 to 80 old tractors around the parish — its low gearing ensures a long gap between me and the next ahead until we reach a hill, the steeper the better, when all that low-end torque shows its strength and up we swoop like a swallow. Well, sort of.

Torque was also a feature of the week’s second convertible, the new Bentley GTC. I had to cross the parish boundary for that and fly by private charter to Croatia; one puts up with these things. Hard to imagine, but the torque of this new model makes progress even more effortless than in the 2006 version. The 6.0-litre V12 now yields 516lb.ft of torque and 567bhp, while the six-speed Quickshift transmission offers 0–60mph in 4.5 seconds (same as another new wind-in-your hair bit of fun, the £30,000 Morgan three-wheeler). With an official top speed of 195mph, the GTC edges my tractor by about 183mph, although Bentley’s traditional caution with such figures means that real tops would be 200mph-plus.