The Bentley Flying Spur might be the best luxury car on sale today. But have you ever wondered if it really needed 12 cylinders? Well it turns out Bentley definitely did, and decided to remove the giant W12 engine to slot in a slighter, more manageable V8.
It takes over a hundred hours to build a bentley flying spur in that time the car goes through 84 different processes in crew 141 different people work to hand make it three kilometers of thread go into the interior stitching 64 different pieces of leather together the side features the single largest piece of metal fitted to a road car and the champagne
Coolers in the back they can take two full-size champagne bottles now we’ve already driven the bentley flying spur my colleague sean drove it back in the glorious summer of 2020 and this car made its debut at speed week in october so why are we driving another flying spur other than why not because this one has a v8 well there isn’t much extra to say about
The v8 from the outside it’s worth noting this really is a very handsome car just like the bentega we drove last year they’ve taken the nice bits from the continental gt and transplanted them with pretty good results onto the much bigger car i won’t bang on about the outside for too long because you’ve well you’ve seen it but there are a few features on
This particular car that i do really like there’s the front for example which is really bluff it’s very regal which is great from the company that builds cars for the queen there’s also other smaller features it has the usual flying b on the front which lifts in a very beautiful slow motion out of the bonnet when you unlock the car and then fires itself
Away when you lock it and will hide itself if someone tries to steal it for some reason it also really wants you to know that it is a bentley and it will not let you forget that fact there is other than the bee on the front little logos everywhere there’s two bees on the wheels on each one not only in the center cap but also on the dust covers in case
You forget there is a bentley logo stamped into the carbon fiber sills when you open the door there are bentley logo puddle lights it really won’t let you forget there’s also speaking of those sills carbon fiber all over the place it’s got carbon fiber sills it’s got a carbon fiber chin it’s even got a carbon fiber spoiler on the back because this is the
Lightweight sporty model obviously there’s also black surrounds everywhere just to remind you that this isn’t some old stuffy chromed thing although if you walk up to some of them and touch them you’ll notice they’re a little bit plastic in this rather nice british racing green on a black grill it really is screaming get out of the way enough about the
Outside you know what it looks like it it looks like a bentley what you want to know about is what’s in here and if you’re buying a flying spur you want to be sat back here if you’re buying a bentley to drive to sit up front you’re buying a bentayga or you’re buying a continental gt no you want to be sat here with someone else driving these seats i mean to
Call them seats is doing it a bit of an injustice they’re more they’re more chairs and these aren’t even the nicest seats you can get in the back of a flying spa but they’re still fantastic you feel costed and comfortable and you can adjust them in almost every single manner that you could imagine and they even have pillows yeah they’ve got pillows on the
Back of your headrest this sort of winged style that you get on an airplane where you can fall asleep to the side you can have a tray table in front of you and one of my favorite things which you’ll find in other bentleys as well is this little screen which you can pop out well it doesn’t pop out it sort of presents itself to you and you can control almost
Anything you want on this you can change the radio station you can change your climate control you could even find out how fast you’re going just in case jeeves who you’ve hired isn’t quite getting you there fast enough and you can give them a clip around the earl but probably need some kind of stick there’s also features like the very useful champagne
Cooler which can be found in here and can be and i quote this from bentley stocked to shoot any occasion i therefore have got nothing there’s plenty of power for if you need to work on your way to whatever meeting it is you’re being driven to the usb and they’re not actually usbc which is interesting but if you have spent 150 000 pounds on your flying
Spur and you haven’t got the cash left over for the driver you’re gonna find yourself up there if you are forced to sit up here let’s be honest you’re not going to be slamming it it’s i mean it’s beautiful everything is controlled as you would expect on a car today with so a couple of giant screens there’s one in front of me that’s entire digital and then
There’s this humongous touchscreen in the middle which is 12.3 inches and i am sure that i have lived with televisions in my home that are smaller than that but if you’re driving along and you don’t want something as gauche and modern as a touch screen then you can just touch here and it’ll disappear and it’ll be replaced with some nice old-fashioned dials
And you’ll feel like you really are in a bentley there’s also there’s little touches that you you don’t notice until you sit inside like the fact that the the edges to many of the switches like the volume controls and stuff replicate the pattern inside the lights on the outside you can customize this to your heart’s content although one of the foibles
Is that if you’ve bought a car like this and then you end up touching some of these beautiful wood bits because they’re so laminated there’s just fingerprints everywhere and once you’re done playing around with swinging that screen backwards and forwards which i know you can keep doing and you won’t get particularly bored there’s so many other things to
Play with you’ve got a heated seat you’ve got heated steering wheels you’ve obviously got climate control you’ve got blinds in the back and on the rear window that you can put up and down anything and it’s just little touches like when you want to reveal the cup holders after you’ve had your champagne in the back the movement is just oh it’s just really
Nice now the main change between the other flying spur and this one can be found in here the launch flying spur came with a honking great 12-cylinder engine which had its cylinders arranged in a weird sort of awkward double v it’s called a w12 this one has a good old-fashioned v8 actually it’s four liters but because this car was designed to also take
A massive w12 and it’s quite small that v8 is twin turbocharged it’s based on the same tsi unit you’ll find in the bentayga and various other volkswagen group cars here we find 550 ps and 770 newton meters of torque which is both significantly less than the w12 and more than enough to shred pluto all that talk is delivered at just 2000 rpm in a pretty
Flat curve which means you’re just a flick of the toe away from speeding away from any oix who happen to get in your way peak power is at 6000 rpm and the bentley flying spur will wang its way on to 198 miles per hour if you need to cross the continent tomorrow more importantly 60 miles per hour is reached in four seconds which is not bad for a car that
Weighs 2.2 tonnes the most important thing here though is 100 kilograms lighter than the w12 that it replaces that’s like literally removing me and all of our camera gear and then still having to shave some more weight off and this isn’t just an off-the-shelf simple to use simple to fix v8 there’s some proper tech in here to better manage the packaging
Of the engine itself the two turbochargers have been positioned inside the v that also means exhaust gases don’t have to travel as far from the cylinder to the turbocharger minimizing luck because if you’re drinking champagne a sudden burst of unexpected acceleration is just not on weight reduction the better centre of gravity combined with bentley drive
Dynamics and the optional rear wheel steer bentley say have increased the flying spurs agility which is i must point out their word not ours because as much as you can do to a 2.2 tonne car that’s over five meters long and designed to waft around agility is it’s just not the word i’m sorry bentley it it’s not an agile car which is not say it’s a bad car
Oh no it’s incredibly impressive that rear wheel steer which steers against the steering when you’re at lower speeds and with the steering at higher speeds for better stability means you can turn this car around and not much further than its own length which is quite impressive when you’re trying to maneuver something that is the size of a bentayga and
Feels sometimes like it’s the size of a bus it’s also surprisingly economical it’s got cylinder deactivation below certain speeds which means it basically turns itself into a really big golf the two-liter four-cylinder engine at that point and altogether bentley recommend it’s got about a range of 440 miles which is enough to get you to champaign to pick
Up the latest stocks and not quite all the way back that we’ve managed look at this i think we’ve managed around 21 miles per gallon which is decent actually for something like this something so smooth in its torque delivery not relying on everything being miles at the rev range that’s very impressive there’s no real feel to the steering it’s not light
It’s not sort of horrible and wafty light it’s just there it’ll do what you want it feels like it it gives you some responses to what’s happening the ones that it thinks you expect but i wouldn’t rely too much the brakes are extremely good you’ve got to put some force into it but it just doesn’t feel like you’re pushing anything other than a sponge it’s
Not sort of really giving you any feedback on what’s going on throttle response is fine it’s quite good actually there are very few cars that can justify really deep down a 150 000 pound price tag and in that bracket there are very few cars that can actually stand up to the flying spur maybe the 7 series and the a8 but more likely the ghost or the s-class
But there’s just there’s just something about the flying spur that sets it apart i’m not sure if it’s the history behind the bentley name or the fact that this car still feels a little bit more refined than the gadget laden germans the flying spur just has a little something else that keeps drawing you in you
Transcribed from video
Bentley Flying Spur V8 | Road Review By Goodwood Road \u0026 Racing