German Car Zone

The red-and-white curbs strobe by slowly as the soft leather steering wheel slips through my hands, its winged B logo twisting through 270 degrees. The car it's controlling, a nearly $400,000 Bentley Brooklands coupe, is almost too long for this chicane. There's too much grandiose British steel here, too much surging power underhood for this exercise. Besides, it's hard enough coordinating turn-in points, braking zones, and trailing throttle without having to worry about dodging vagrants.

I have the Brooklands here on Detroit's Belle Isle — a tiny sliver of land in the Detroit River, and home to the IndyCar/ALMS racing that commandeers its wide thoroughfares for a weekend each summer — for mostly semantic reasons. The Brooklands is named after an old, irrelevant racetrack. Belle Isle is a freshly paved-and-curbed, but still irrelevant, racetrack. The symmetry is inescapable.



For the rest of the year, when racing isn't filling this unsceptred isle, Belle Isle is a place for recreating, procreating, and defecating. There's standing water in the pavement's dips, and shopping carts at the river's edge. Belle Isle achieves an almost poetic level of awfulness; a damp, forgotten city-of-the-future dystopia that is downright cinematic.

The Brooklands stands for the maintenance of tradition; Belle Isle for the abandonment of it. I can almost feel the big Bentley snap its nostrils shut as it's forced to bob around empty pint bottles of Remy Martin, discarded food wrappers, and crack-eating Canada geese and their crackbaby chicks. Nevertheless, I drop the window by way of a small, chromed switch and wave regally to the locals, though they be peasants. Two of these smile toothlessly and brandish flasks in approval. While rounding a corner, I hear a groan from the Brooklands' rear tires that sounded not unlike an old gent gasping, "Oh dear!"

But street courses are for little carbon-fiber insects, not smelted mammals. Between the apexes, the Brooklands feels less like a car and more like a large, hideously expensive piece of furniture. In fact, it probably has more in common with a Regency sideboard than a Honda Accord. Both it and the Honda move under their own power, sure, but it's the way the Bentley locomotes that divorces it from the realm of mere transportation.

First of all, I have seen how these cars are built, in the old, redbrick, green-doored factory compound in Crewe. Each dashboard is boiled off a huge root ball of ash, walnut, cherry, or any other tree the customer wants. Artisanal bookmatching and joinery make sure the veneers' grains line up. The leather is from Spanish oxen and inspected under dimmer-controlled florescent lights, their imperfections taped off and concealed. Only four robots exist in the entire 68-acre site, and they are only here to mete out paint. A Brooklands such as I'm driving takes a full season to complete. It is an heirloom car, a rolling preservation of old techniques exemplified by details like the rear windshield: The glass floats above the long trunk, its seamless line achieved by hand welding the aft fenders to the C-pillars.

This particular example — one of 550 — is lined in oxblood leather, and it's buttery, and it's everywhere. The seats are quilted in it, the sunvisors are covered in it, and the headliner isn't just a long swath of it; it's upholstered like a couch. What is not leather is wool, or wood, or chrome. Big, shiny eyeball vents and slender, glistening organ pulls control airflow. A plank of dark wood houses the instruments, beautifully legible with their watch-like faces. It's larger inside than Bentley's last supercoupe, the Continental R, with a back seat nearly as large as a sitting room. There are even repeater handles at the back of the doors for rear passengers, even though they don't get their own apertures.

This car is optioned out with very powerful carbon-ceramic brakes (*cough* $29,270); the $8430 Brooklands Sports Combination Package (20-inch five-spoke two-piece wheels, dark-tinted steel bumper matrix, quilted seats and door inserts, aforesaid headliner, and embroidered marque emblems on all seats); a $3190 retractable Flying B radiator ornament (perfect for this mission); and $2490 back-up camera. The price, including destination and gas-guzzler tax (I got 9 mpg) brings the grand total to $391,465.

Ironically, it doesn't have some of the stuff that a car costing a tenth as much would have as standard. There are no cooled seats, no satellite radio, and I couldn't figure out the nav system. But does any of that crap really matter? Do you need total technological supremacy when you're so demonstrably on top? The Brooklands makes even the Continental GT look like the wife's car.



I point its big prow north, away from the island, and the hood parts the filthy city's troubles before me. Under that long expanse of metal is Bentley's most powerful V-8 engine ever. Its all-aluminum, five-bearing-crankshaft architecture dates back to the 6.23-liter of 1959; it was bored out to 6.75 liters ten years later, where its displacement remains today. Its most significant change came in 1982 with the addition of turbocharging for the blown Mulsanne. This version gets a reprofiled cam, low-inertia turbos, and a revised ECU for a power rating of 530 hp and a staggering, stump-pulling 774 lb-ft of torque. I exercise it with the carelessness of a man who owns an oil field.

Now the Brooklands is fully at home, cruising long-leggedly on the highway, setting contentedly into curves with its reassuring, weighty steering. To pull 80 mph requires just 1500 rpm; the same gearing, in fact, as in the Conti GT and the pre-war Blower Bentley. (Though its tach is the size of a dinner plate, it redlines at 4600 rpm.) Its six-speed transmission surges through its gear changes with the rhythm and power of oceanic undertow. The car is simply a force of nature, plowing through 60 mph in 5.0 seconds and with unstoppable momentum, making you aware of every one of the car's 5853 pounds.

Its mass is an ever-present reminder that the Brooklands, like the very people who would own such a car, makes its own rules. Is there body roll? You bet. Does the car trim out like a speedboat when you mash the alloy gas pedal? Of course it does. That, the Bentley seems to suggest, is what real cars do. This car is a proud and magnificent anachronism, a machine with one axle in the '50s and one in the aughts. Or, to put it in the language of Belle Isle, it's some classic shit.


Source: MotiveMagazine.com - Motive First Drive: 2008 Bentley Brooklands - Belle Isle's Finest in a Ghetto Wonderland