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Written by:
Autocar staff
http://www.autocar.co.uk
03/13/2008 - 03:20 PM
London, UK
“You can thread the Bentley with as much confidence as the DB9. Its steering is so well judged.” (Charlie Magee/Autocar photo) » More Photos
It wasn’t just a computer game that hijacked the phrase “gran turismo” – although applying a couple of words coined to describe inter-continental cruising to the practice of ragging a 1000hp Supra around a virtual circuit in Japan called “Grand Valley East” did seem a bit of a liberty. No, it was a paradigm shift in the way human beings began to behave towards the end of the 1970s that skewed the meaning of “grand touring.”
With the electronic age emerged a new need to save time, and touring – regardless of whether your Ferrari 365 GTC had 320hp – never had anything to do with elapsed time. You may have squirted between destinations but, beyond making that next dinner reservation on time, there were no temporal constraints. Life was too civilized for such things.
How times change. Snug in the new Bentley Continental GT Speed, the freeway is a foreign environment. Hermetically sealed from the bustle and frenzy of 2008 commuter travel, it feels quite at odds with the surroundings, like a Riva among hordes of jet skis. We’re on course for Bala in North Wales, where open roads and decent surfaces beckon, but for now the Bentley and its disparate rivals do their best to justify themselves at low speed among the ordinary metal.
“You can thread the Bentley with as much confidence as the DB9. Its steering is so well judged.” (Charlie Magee/Autocar photo) » More Photos
“Disparate” is an unavoidable adjective in any modern GT test, largely because there are very few unambiguously gran turismo coupés on sale. The
The sporting GTs category is represented here by the Aston Martin DB9, a car you might have forgotten in the flurry of smaller and larger Astons that have appeared over the past three years. Its statistics are easily the least impressive on display, but only if 450hp, 3770lbs and a claimed top speed of over 180mph can truly be considered ordinary. Steeply raked front and rear windows suggest its sporting intent, but as ever it’s the transmission that determines this car’s role. Back in 2004 this was the first car successfully to take ZF’s six-speed automatic gearbox and introduce software that blipped the throttle on manual downshifts. In doing so, it produced the best hybrid sports/GT we’d ever seen. At $171,600, it’s the bargain of the group.
Sandwiched between the Brits (well, Teuto-Brits) is the Mercedes-Benz CL65 AMG. Say what you will about the image of the thing (Merc will supply a mullet and ’tash for all customers, apparently), but you can’t argue with the company’s provenance in this field; the 560 SEC remains one of the finest cars ever built. Nor will you find fault with its specification: a 604hp twin-turbocharged V12 that, when spinning at 2000rpm, produces 737lb ft of torque – a figure that would be greater still if the five-speed auto were more manly.
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