Bentley Is Going All Porsche With A New, More Agile Continental GT

The next Bentley Continental GT’s platform has been co-developed with Porsche, it has emerged, as the British firm goes chasing lap times as well as luxury.
The Continental is long overdue a replacement, with its chassis having been in service almost unchanged since 2003. A few journalists have just taken to the passenger seat of the new car’s development mule for an early taste of how the new car drives.

Autocar quotes Cameron Paterson, Director of Whole Vehicle Engineering for the new GT, as saying the process with Porsche started early this decade.

““The car itself is a four-year development process, but we started the platform work with Porsche a good year and a half before that.”

The new car will ditch the old fixed all-wheel drive system in favour of a more complex and capable electronically-controlled four-wheel drive that usually drives the rear wheels only. The car should be about 100kg lighter overall, says Autocar, but it has a much better 52:48 front-rear weight distribution. The current car’s is a nose-heavy 56:44.

The steering will switch to an electric setup from hydraulic, torque vectoring will be introduced to both axles and the W12 engine will boast a minimum of 592bhp. Plenty, in other words. The 0-62mph time is expected to drop below four seconds, while top speed should top 200mph even before any Speed edition.

More than 100 development cars have been hand-built for testing, with earlier examples costing the company as much as a million euros each to construct. Later cars were line-produced. One of the key objectives was to make the GT handle better and appeal to younger buyers.

Rolf Frech, another lead engineer on the project, explained a bit more to the weekly magazine.

“Even in the last year, however, we’ve seen a shift in the customer base. The US market, for example, is already getting younger. Of course, the marketing has improved and the dealerships have improved, but I strongly believe the GT3 motorsport programme has helped a lot.

“The old-fashioned image of a Bentley driver – the old guy with the hat – has gone because we’ve showed [with the GT3 car] what the Continental is capable of.”

Is this the right way for Bentley to go? Should it be looking at handling and lap times, or should it concentrate on luxury and comfort? Let us know your thoughts.

Via: Autocar