Do sportier looks and largely unchanged mechanicals make for a better petrol-electric Bentley?
in February, the Flying Spur S is available as a V8 or a plug-in hybrid. So obvs, we went for the V8 then? Well, no. We know the V8 engine is a sonorous delight but this hybrid is where the smart money goes these days.last year and liked it a lot, but I’d still have the V8, of course. That's because I am neither smart nor moneyed. The difference this time is a sportier look, with more black than the chrome of the regular Flying Spur.
Granted, this isn’t a full-on driver’s car because the handling isn’t exciting. It’s geared to understeer and feels heavy when you really chuck it about round a roundabout. So the sporty looks aren’t truly backed up with substance, but no one’s really going to drive it hard are they? At best they might press on at a seven-tenths lick down a country road, just as I did, and when you do that it flows.
That hints there’s still a little bit of set-up work required to perfect this drivetrain’s integration. What confirms that the engineers need to get cracking on some updates are the jolts you get every now and again. It's very much an occasional thing, but come on you Bentley boys: if Kia can sell a slicker hybrid for less than a quarter of the price of this Spur, I bet you can do better.
However, even the silly truck wheels can’t spoil the Spur’s abnormally good high-speed ride. I have a test when assessing a car’s suspension, which is to rest my head gently on the headrest and see how much my noggin gets knocked forward. A bad car, like some of the earlier Tesla Model 3s I drove, will punch your head off the headrest like the plunger on a pinball machine. The good ones give it a gentle shove every now and then.
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