German Car Zone

Bentley's Brooklands Coupe: 2 doors, 4 seats, 6 figures

With a base price of $340,990, Bentley's Brooklands Coupe offers the super-rich automotive exclusivity, style and personalization
FLORENCE, Italy–You wouldn't think Bentley could learn any lessons about car development from Chrysler.
Certainly, Bentley would cringe at the very suggestion.
But in the 1980s, Chrysler became the world champion of platform strategy, spinning such vehicles as the Caravan/Voyager minivans, Le Baron coupe and Daytona sports car off the K-car architecture.
At a much more sophisticated and expensive level, Bentley is doing much the same thing.
Using just two platforms – the ancient Arnage and the more modern Continental GT – it now has almost a dozen different models in the range.
The strategy has been wildly successful. In 2007, Bentley broke the 10,000 unit mark, shoving 10,014 cars out the door. Ten years ago, it sold fewer than 1,000.
The latest variant, the Brooklands Coupe, aims to be the most exclusive, most luxurious and perhaps the most expensive four-seat coupe on the market, with a starting price of $340,990 (U.S.). A Canadian price hasn't been established yet, but if you have to ask ...

Brooklands belongs to the Arnage side (near-vintage, pre-VW ownership) of the Bentley family. If the Azure convertible is a two-door version of the Arnage sedan, with the top sawn off, then the Brooklands is essentially an Azure with a steel top welded back on.
The low-slung roof and true "hardtop convertible" pillarless, body-side construction is beautiful, and makes the car look substantially smaller than the sedan.
Wheelbase and width remain as with Arnage and Azure; the Brooklands regains rear-seat legroom lost in the Azure to that car's pop-up roll-over hoops, making Brooklands among the roomiest coupes.
As with all members of this branch of the family tree, Brooklands is powered by a 6.75 L twin-turbocharged V8 engine, each one hand-built at the Crewe England factory by a team of technicians; the team leader affixes a nameplate bearing his signature to each unit his crew assembles.

The engine has been further tweaked in Brooklands: reduced back pressure thanks to a new exhaust system, revised valve timing and a recalibrated engine management system raise horsepower from 500 to 530, and torque now peaks at a tugboat-challenging 774 lb.-ft. Uli Eichhorn, Bentley's board member for product development, says this is the highest torque output of any production V8 in the world.
It's enough to shove the car from rest to 100 km/h in a near-supercar 5.3 seconds, with a top speed of 296 km/h.
Eichhorn, by any measure one of the brightest and most modern engineers in the automobile business, seemed strangely proud to also claim that this V8 is currently the oldest engine still in continuous production, its progenitor having been introduced in 1959.

Of course, continuous development means no specific parts are interchangeable; on that basis, a counter-argument could be made for Chevrolet's small-block V8.
The relevant point is that the 2008 engine produces vastly more output than the 1959 version, uses 60 per cent less fuel and generates 99 per cent fewer emissions. That, my friends, is progress.
The six-speed ZF transmission, adapted to Arnage-based Bentleys for the 2007 model year, has been retuned slightly for the Brooklands. A Sport mode allows manual override of gear selection, but only by manipulation of the console shift lever.

The all-independent suspension has also been gently massaged, mainly to maintain rear-seat ride quality.
Choose the optional carbon ceramic brakes (a mere $19,650 (U.S.) extra) and you get the world's biggest front brake rotors at 420 mm in diameter (356 mm rear), shared with the Continental GT Speed. The discs last for the life of the car, and make the brakes almost completely fade-free.
The interior is the definition of sumptuous – even the headliner is leather-trimmed. Choice abounds. If none of the standard 42 exterior colours (one, a coral, has never been picked), 25 colours of leather and three wood veneers for dash, console and door trim rotate your Rolex, send (or, better still, bring) a colour sample to Crewe, and the company's in-house customizing operation, Mulliner, will do its level best.
The deeply contoured seats front and rear are very comfortable and supportive. The fronts have a welcome massage function. They also motor forward when the backs are pivoted to ease access to the rear, but the glacial pace is frustrating.

It is difficult to imagine that a huge, 2,600-plus kg vehicle could handle at all, especially on twisty narrow Italian secondary highways, let alone handle well.
But the steering is light and direct, the grip provided by the massive 255/40 ZR20 Pirelli tires is amazing, and once you gain a degree of confidence in the car's abilities, it can be hustled right smartly. You do have standard electronic stability control to bail you out should you overcook it.
Despite the weight, that tsunami of torque really shoves the car along, although the fuel gauge swings to the left as fast as the speedo swings to the right.
The transmission shifts unobtrusively, but if you want to get it on, best shift gears yourself, because a throttle-stomp takes a second or two to awaken the controller.
If any six-figure car can be said to have "function" as part of its brief, then from a functional perspective, no case can properly be made for the Bentley Brooklands. Among cars that do most things better than it are several models from Bentley itself, at a fraction of the price.
But as Richard Leopold, director of marketing for Bentley, notes, the super-rich are looking for more than capability. They look for products that reflect their own values of authenticity, exclusivity, style, personalization and rarity.

This car's very name addresses authenticity: the famed Brooklands race track in London was the scene of many Bentley racing triumphs in the 1920s and '30s.
Brooklands also follows the Bentley coupe tradition established by such as the late-'30s Woolf Barnato Blue Train Coupe, the early-'50s S1 Continental Mulliner and the 1997 Continental T, the car which really got Bentley started back on the road to relevance.
Exclusivity and rarity are covered by the fact that in a projected three-year production cycle, which has started now, only 550 cars will be built. The rate-determining factor is the solitary craftsman who brazes the roof to the rear fenders, a process that takes almost half a day itself, not to mention the metal finishing required to smooth out the join. The wood in the car alone requires a month to fabricate and fit.
Style? The photos speak for themselves.

Personalization? Even with just the standard colours, Bentley could build 103.5 billion combinations – 753 million years worth of production – before it built the same car twice. Every customer who has already put a deposit down on a Brooklands will take advantage of the customizing skills of the Mulliner division to some degree.
Speaking of those customers, orders started flowing in the minute the car was unveiled at the Geneva Motor Show about a year ago. All but 50 have been spoken for, so if you aren't on a Christmas-card basis with your local Bentley dealer already, you're probably too late.
2008 Bentley Brooklands
PRICE: base $340,990 U.S., as tested $381,590 U.S. (no Cdn. price yet).
ENGINE: 6.75 L V8 twin turbo
POWER/TORQUE:
530 hp/774 lb.-ft.
FUEL CONSUMPTION: (EU)
Urban 28.8, hwy. 14.1 L/100 km
COMPETITION: Mercedes-Benz CLS L AMG, a small yacht
WHAT'S BEST:
Massive appeal, massive performance, massive exclusivity
WHAT'S WORST:
Massive thirst, massive price, just plain massive.
WHAT INTERESTING: As close to a guarantee that you will never see yourself coming down the street as you're likely to get.

Toronto Star

http://www.wheels.ca/article/173223

It's an awesome car and sad, that they had only taken one picture.