In its quest for comfort, Bentley has made the entire powertrain response a bit too soft and this affects the driving experience. The result is that, even when you floor it, you don’t feel the engine’s force until you hit 2,500 rpm. And if you’re using a higher gear like we’re doing now for our highway run, the
W12 engine feels like it’s struggling below 3,000 rpm.
Thus, the Flying Spur W12 forces you to either drive it a very relaxed manner, or work it heavily, with or without by using the manual gearshift mode to keep it in the proper rev range. Despite the fact that its paddles offer perfect ergonomics, albeit in a plasticky wrap, you can’t really drive such a car in the manual mode. This all means you’ll have to exaggerate, be it in terms of elegance or the opposite.
As for the automatic transmission, this acts much like a well-trained butler. You can hardly feel it at work. Even when you’re mashing the throttle, it won’t deliver a balance-upsetting shift.
Once you go past the aforementioned issue, the W12 engine feels exactly like the kind of unit that can push this Bentley to its 200 mph (322 km/h) top speed without breaking a sweat. So calibration is the issue here.
We have not grabbed the wheel of the Flying Spur V8 yet, but we expect the comparison between this and our W12 tester to follow the pattern set by our Continental GT drives - except for the image, we found no other real advantage of the
W12. The
V8 would be an easy choice for us.
As for the W12 unit’s thirst, the EPA figures place the Flying Spur at 12/20/15 mpg (city/highway/combined). During our drive, which featured what we like to believe was a balanced use, we averaged 10.5 mpg (22.4 liters per 100 km).
Nonetheless, the rest of the Bentley Flying Spur comes to wrap you in a deeply comforting state of mind. The thing isolates you from the outside world, but it somehow does this in an active manner. Unlike the
Bentley Mulsanne, the Flying Spur doesn’t unplug the driver in the process of offering coziness.
And since we’re comparing the two, the Flying Spur is pretty close to the Mulsanne in terms of comfort. Spend a bit of time in the back seat and you will understand. The larger Bentley model obviously keeps its status premium, but we would go for the Flying Spur.