Bentley's Alpine Symphony: Conquering Peaks with the Continental GT

Here’s confidence for you: assemble a bunch of journalists at the bottom of the 8200ft Grossglockner Pass, distribute among them a small fleet of your new and rather weighty Grand Touring cars and tell them to see you at the top. The new Bentley Continental GT is not just vast in stature, it is not short of heft either: although lighter than the car it replaces, this is still 2244kg of prime British Bentley I’m about to fire up one the highest road in Austria. So you settle down in one of its enormous chairs, fire up its 626bhp 6-litre W12 motor, pull the shifter back into manual mode, pull the pin and let it go.

You notice the thrust first – it’ll do 0-62mph in 3.7sec despite all the inertia it must first overcome – and then the howl of the engine and how much easier on the ear it is than the identically configured but barely related motor in the previous Continental GT.

Next you feel the gearchanges, and this is new: while the old car had its shifts slurred and slushed by a conventional automatic box, its successor sports a beefed-up Porsche eight-speed double-clutch transmission. If Sport mode is selected, not only do you get the usual thundering exhausts, stiffened suspension and sharpened throttle, you can also feel each shift being banged through, a new and tactile approach I rather appreciated. Bentley delayed the launch of this car by several months to perfect the gearbox calibration, and while awkward and embarrassing in the short term, a terrific powertrain is the result and over time that will count for rather more.