You Could Own This Pikes Peak-Spec Bentley Continental

The Bentley Continental GT is a car built to go from point to point effortlessly and at great speed. Normally, though, the points it’s going between are the glitzier end of London and a hotel in the south of France, rather than the bottom of a mountain, and the top of that same mountain.

This isn’t an ordinary Bentley Continental GT, though. The front splitter and rear wing that would put a Le Mans Prototype to shame should be evidence enough of that. It’s the very Continental that was built to take on the notoriously tough Pikes Peak International Hill Climb.

It started life as a Continental GT3, one of the bigger chunguses to ever compete in the wildly popular GT3 sports car category. Following its factory racing career, it fell into the hands of FastR, a Derbyshire-based motorsport outfit, whose owner ran it in the British Time Attack Championship in 2019. For this, it was shorn of its GT3-mandated restrictor plates which boosted power from 500 to around 750bhp.

At the same time, Bentley was looking to mount a proper effort on Pikes Peak after running production-spec Bentaygas and Continentals for a couple of years. The two outfits got together and set about transforming the car to cope with the unique challenges of a 12.4-mile, 156-turn course that ends higher than the altitude at which flights have to carry oxygen masks.

Much of that transformation involved the fitment of that enormous aero to keep the car locked down on Pikes Peak’s many hairpins. The engine was also further fettled to run on sustainable fuel and produce somewhere in the region of 1000bhp.

The pandemic delayed the car’s competition debut to 2021, but when it did finally run, it was piloted by two-time Pikes Peak winner, Rhys Millen. The car was fastest in its class in testing, but on the day, it suffered a pressure issue that prevented Millen from accessing the uppermost gears in the final stages of the run.

The car’s now heading to auction with Iconic Auctioneers, and will go under the hammer at Race Retro on 22 February. It’s guided at £800,000 to £1 million, and apparently, if the new owner wants to head back to Pikes Peak to tie up that unfinished business, Millen is keen to drive it again. Sorry, Rhys – if we’d dropped that sort of money on it, we’d be doing the driving ourselves.