The Grand Finale: Bentley's Continental Supersports Bids Adieu with a Roar

When someone comes to write the definitive history of Bentley – who knows, perhaps in time for its centenary in 2019 – he or she will have to consider the models most significant to the brand’s survival. There is of course the original, the 3-litre whose twin-spark 16-valve engine was born on a bench in New Street Mews. There was the Speed Six which, like the 3-litre, won Le Mans twice, and the 8-litre, WO’s masterpiece, born into a world that didn’t want it. After bankruptcy came the Rolls-Bentleys, the superb overdrive Derbys of 1938-39 and the 1952 R-type Continental. Then little more than badge-engineered anonymity until 1982 when the Mulsanne Turbo gave the marque an identity of its own once more.

And then the Continental GT, after the 3-litre the car I would argue was the most significant of all. Before it, Bentley could scarcely sell 1000 cars a year; but thanks to the Continental GT and its derivatives Bentley sales have topped 10,000. It is the Continental GT that brought new levels of engineering integrity to Bentley, that transformed the brand’s image around the world. Its success ultimately convinced Volkswagen, which had bought the brand in 2003, to make the single biggest investment the company had ever seen so an SUV could be designed, engineered and built at Crewe. By the end of the decade Bentley production will probably top 20,000 and I’d be surprised if most were not Bentaygas. And it was the Continental GT that made it all possible.

But now its time is nigh. Fifteen seasons sitting on the architecture of a defunct VW saloon is an extraordinary record, but you don’t need long in one to see the evidence of its age in its mass, its 20th century ergonomics, its joke graphics, its uneven weight distribution.