Balancing act: New Bentley Continental GT

It’s wet, the race track is flooded in places, I’ve never been here before and I have 771bhp under my right boot. Normally this confluence of circumstances would not trouble me unduly, but what I also have is Dr Matthias Rabe in my passenger seat, and he is a Bentley board member, in charge of all its engineering. One of les plus grands of all the gros fromages in Crewe.

He’s been parked next to me because I have been described to him as ‘a safe pair of hands’ which I think is a compliment, so now I feel obliged to live up to that billing.

Except I’ve only got four laps – four laps in which to do a complete dynamic assessment of what Bentley is calling the ‘fourth generation of Continental GT’ which is actually more of a heavily revised third-gen car, which was itself actually a second-gen car because it was and remains to date the only genuinely new GT since the launch of the original back in 2003. As more people on this platform speak 911 than any other automotive language, think of this as a 992 to a 991.