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Featuring a 6-litre, 12 cylinder, twin-turbocharged, engine with
more than 500bhp driving all four wheels through a paddle-operated,
six speed automatic gearbox, the Continental GT offers true supercar
performance combined with the interior space, versatility and ease
of ownership to make it not merely viable as an everyday car, but a
natural for the role. In this respect as well as many others,
Bentley believes the Continental GT to be unique.
The Continental GT is being designed and engineered by Bentley at
Crewe and will be manufactured there in all-new facilities that
combine state of the art technologies with the unique hand finishing
and attention to detail that have been the hallmark of all cars to
wear the winged ‘B’. It goes on sale in the second half of 2003 and
will bring the prospect of Bentley ownership to a wider audience of
discerning enthusiasts than ever before. And while the Continental
GT is a Bentley from bumper to bumper, the role of the company’s
Volkswagen parent can scarcely be ignored.
The dream of building a new Bentley coupé is not new – indeed it has
been alive at Crewe for over 20 years. But it was only the £500
million vote of confidence placed in the marque by VW that brought
the dream to reality. And VW has more than merely made funds
available to design an all-new car. It has also enabled Bentley to
transform the Crewe factory into a thoroughly modern centre of
manufacturing excellence.
Styling
The styling story of the Continental GT dates back to August 1999
when newly appointed head of design, Dirk van Braeckel was briefed
to prepare a concept for an all new Bentley coupé: one that would
use 80 years of Bentley design as its inspiration, yet look only to
the future in its shape. It took just four months – until just
before Christmas – when van Braeckel submitted his preferred design
to the board of Bentley Motors. It was approved on the spot.
Bentley’s design philosophy for the Continental GT can be quantified
as follows: the car must have a short front overhang and an overtly
dominant bonnet expressed by the unusually large distance between
the front axle line and the A-pillar.
The pillarless cabin itself needs to be sleek and compact while the
rear haunches should be taut and pronounced, giving the impression
of a crouching animal ready to pounce.
Finally there was what van Braeckel refers to as the car’s
‘jewellery’. Because the shape of the car is essentially complex and
to suit its sporting intentions, it was decided that brightwork
should be minimised, limited to the door surrounds, a finish along
the sill, the exhaust surrounds and radiator grille. But the
headlamps themselves assume a dominant role in the styling signature
with the inner units being the larger of the two pairs both in tacit
acknowledgment of past Bentleys, but also to draw attention to the
most distinctive Bentley feature of all: the matrix radiator grille.
Interior design and style
The cabin of the Continental GT is designed to make Bentley devotees
and marque newcomers feel equally at home. Those familiar with the
Bentley way of doing things will be reassured, comforted and
cosseted by the expanses of top quality hide and fine wood veneers;
those for whom Bentley ownership is a new experience will discover a
new level of luxury, style and effortless good taste.
For the man or woman behind the wheel a unique driving environment
awaits. Bentley’s interior designers have been as far as to measure
New York basketball players to make sure all shapes and sizes can be
accommodated. Bentley is one of few car manufacturers to retain seat
design as an in-house field of excellence.
The toughest task facing designers of all luxury car cabins these
days is to present the controls and information interfaces in a way
that is both uncluttered yet easy to use. Bentley’s solution is to
use intelligence, common sense and ergonomic know-how to cherry-pick
the best elements from both extremes, and combine them in a cabin
that is both effective and attractive.
Most routine operations used frequently when the car is in motion –
such as the cruise and basic music controls – can be operated direct
from the steering wheel. Other functions such as the
air-conditioning, navigation, computer information and more advanced
entertainment features are individually controlled, but displayed on
the same screen sited in the middle of the centre console.
Instrumentation is provided by classically styled dials that live in
deep recesses ahead of the steering wheel, while a small screen
directly in the driver’s sight-line monitors all relevant in-car
systems.
Design
The design brief for the Continental GT was as simple to state as it
was difficult to realise: create a car with as much room as the most
spacious coupés on the market, equip it with the performance and
responses of the world’s most dynamic supercars and retain the whole
within compact dimensions.
Go looking for the real key to providing sufficient interior room
and you’ll need to start your search under the bonnet. There you
will discover that the secret of the Continental GT’s interior room
is, in fact, its engine. By choosing the basic architecture of the
W12 powerplant used elsewhere in the VW Group, Bentley’s engineers
were provided not simply with the opportunity to develop it into a
unique Bentley engine, but also to exploit its phenomenal packaging
attributes.
Instead of using two long banks of six cylinders, as featured on all
conventional V12 motors, the W12 staggers the cylinders in each bank
creating effectively two extraordinarily narrow angle (15deg) V6
engines sharing a common crankshaft and giving rise to the ‘W’
formation. This naturally provides a phenomenally short engine for
its considerable capacity. Indeed it is the shortest twelve cylinder
engine on the market.
An important benefit of the Continental GT’s design is the omission
of a B-pillar. There are many aesthetic reasons for adopting the
pillarless look, but for those inside looking out and particularly
those in the back, the unbroken expanse of glass from the front to
the rear of the cabin provides a feeling of great space and
airiness.
Even the 355 litre luggage capacity has only been achieved through
fresh thinking and innovation. In cars of this size, it is accepted
practice to site the fuel tank between the boot and rear seat. The
Continental GT’s fuel tank, however, is under the floor of the car.
Not only is there enough boot space to swallow enough luggage for a
family fortnight away, if that holiday happens to be to the ski
slopes, it will take all four sets of skis inside the car or two
pairs of skis and a couple of snow boards.
Design Technology
The Continental GT is the first Bentley to have been designed
entirely in the virtual world. That is to say every single
component, down to the smallest washer or bolt was not merely
computer designed, but designed into the Continental GT concept
alongside every other part.
Using the very latest CATIA-based Computer Aided Design (CAD)
programmes, the Continental GT represents a huge step forward in
Bentley design technology. One critical aspect of the design work
that is now done in the virtual world enables Bentley to produce
theoretically perfect component designs before the Data Control
Model (DCM) is made. The DCM is as close to a mathematically
faultless physical model of the interior and exterior of the car as
it is possible to have.
Designing the car this way results not simply in a better built and
more reliable product, it is also likely to be safer too. Bentley’s
advanced Dynamic Crash Analysis (DCA) capability means much of the
trial and error traditionally associated with providing a car with
good impact resistance has been bypassed. Indeed so highly developed
are the procedures that Bentley’s engineers can put a Continental GT
through a real world crash test with great confidence that the
result will vary in no major way from those suggested in virtual
world.
Powertrain
Even before it had been determined how the Continental GT would be
powered, two crucial decisions were made and set in stone. First,
the Continental GT would possess a new level of performance – one
that placed it among the very fastest cars on earth; secondly the
provision of that performance would remain inimitably Bentley.
Reconciling these issues would require a great deal of power, but
more importantly, huge torque delivered evenly across the rev-range.
First of all it was clear that the power output of the standard W12
engine – while impressive for a normally aspirated engine – was not
going to generate the kind of power and torque figures required to
make it not only a great engine but, more importantly, a great
Bentley engine.
It was both impractical and undesirable to increase the engine’s
capacity beyond its existing 6-litre displacement so Bentley’s
engineers decided that it should be turbocharged. Using two
turbochargers on an engine with two banks of cylinders has many
advantages over the old, single turbo method. For a start, because
there are two of them, each turbo is much smaller than would be a
single unit designed for the same purpose. This means they have less
inertia and therefore accelerate up to and back down from operating
speed much more quickly, minimising turbo-lag.
For now it can be confirmed that Bentley will make good its promise
to power the Continental GT with an engine of ‘more than 500bhp’.
The use of four-wheel drive was decided in the earliest stages of
the project and if this sounds like something of a departure for
Bentley – which has only ever made rear-wheel drive cars in its past
– it was felt that this new level of power demanded a commensurate
level of control. In order to ensure that the right Bentley feel is
communicated to the driver, Bentley’s powertrain and chassis
engineers have experimented extensively with the distribution of
torque to the front and rear axles.
Providing the link between the driven wheels and the engine is a
six-speed automatic transmission built for Bentley by ZF and the
first of its type in the world to be used in an ultra-high
performance coupe. Firstly, the new transmission was modified by
moving the differential forward, which allowed the drive shafts to
be as far forward as possible, thus enabling the wheels to be close
to the front of the car. But the defining characteristic of this
transmission, apart from the use of six ratios, is its ability to
lock its torque converter in normal driving, providing the same
immediacy of response expected of manual transmissions.
It is a fair observation that a 6-litre, twin-turbo engine with
tremendous torque does not strictly need six gears to keep itself on
the boil. However, Bentley also knows that most of its customers for
the Continental GT will be enthusiasts who will relish the prospect
of flicking up and down the gearbox at the pull of a paddle or the
push of a lever. Under the circumstances, six speeds seem entirely
appropriate.
Chassis
Perfecting ride and handling is one of the most complex and
difficult areas of car design. For the Continental GT designers this
job has been doubly tough for few cars, if any, have been brought to
market with a greater expectation of excellence in both areas.
Even so, by starting with well defined and extremely ambitious
targets and then applying clear thinking and the skills of a
25-strong chassis engineering team to realise them, the Continental
GT has been equipped with a chassis that should appeal to sybarites
and thrill-seekers equally. The result is a car with firm rather
than harsh suspension, impressive resistance to roll, pitch and
heave yet compliant enough to ride poorly surfaced roads with
absolute equanimity.
The basis of the Continental GT’s chassis strategy is an extremely
stiff body, without which even the most sophisticated of suspension
systems can be undermined. To this was applied the very latest in
suspension technology featuring an innovative double wishbone
arrangement at the front – designed to minimise torque reactions
through the steered wheels – and multi-link rear axle behind.
Air springs are used at each corner in place of conventional coils,
each one containing its own infinitely adjustable electronic damper,
which more than offers a few different settings for the driver to
play with. Within their set parameters they are, in fact, capable of
adjusting themselves infinitely and continuously without the driver
ever being aware of it.
Naturally both traction control and the latest Bosch Electronic
Stability Programme (ESP) are fitted though they can be disabled at
the discretion of the driver. Bentley knows that many of its
customers will want to turn the electronics off from time to time
and they need to be certain that even without these aids, the
Continental GT’s handling remains supremely secure and capable.
Once all the specification of the chassis had been determined, the
Continental GT was put through the most rigorous real world
evaluation programme of any Bentley in history, a process that
continues to this day. From race tracks such as the famed original
Nurburgring to mountain passes and sinuous switchbacks all over the
world, the Continental GT is being tested and re-tested to fine tune
its exceptionally promising chassis specification to provide ride
and handling standards that don’t merely rise above the class
standard but define it.
Safety
The Continental GT is equipped with the full suite of passive safety
equipment. As well as possessing exceptional front, side and rear
deformation characteristics on impact, there are two front airbags,
four side airbags and two side curtain bags that, unusually for a
coupé, each run along the full length of the cabin.
Of course prevention is better than cure and avoiding the accident
in the first place has to be preferable. To this end the Continental
GT is specified like few others in the market. All-wheel drive, when
correctly exploited, has colossal safety advantages in adverse
conditions, while the latest traction, stability and brake control
systems offer further opportunities for drivers to extricate
themselves from danger.
Conclusion
The profile of the typical Continental GT buyer will also be subtly
different from that of the existing Bentley customer. They will tend
to be younger, with an average age of just under as opposed to just
over 50 years. Men will still buy many more than women, but their
majority will decrease from the overwhelming 96-99 per cent of
current customers, to a slightly more balanced 85-90 per cent. They
will be high achieving, hard working and more typically owners of
their own business rather than directors of public companies.
And while they will share a love of high performance, quality and
craftsmanship with all Bentley customers, Continental GT buyers will
likely be interested also in technology and contemporary design.
In all physical senses, the changes the Continental GT has brought
to Bentley have transformed the company beyond recognition. The car
itself and the renewed factory in which it will be built mark the
dawn of a new and thrilling era for the marque. |