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Australia is generally held to be as friendly to speeders as Seinfeld is to Neumann, but there is a stretch, a 2,834km stretch, of road called the Stuart Highway, which is a little different. Spearing across the Northern Territory, the Stuart has no speed limit at all on the 200km stretch that runs across the faceless desert between Alice Springs and Barrow Creek.
Bentley called on the services of John Bowe to make the 'v-max' run in the Continental GT Speed. He's not fazed at all by a 635hp, 820Nm 6.0-litre W12 engine. This is a man who's won the Australian Touring Car title six times, won the famed Bathurst 1000 race twice and is drives a GT3-spec racing Continental GT to boot.
John Bowe said: "This isn't a modified racecar; it's a luxurious grand touring road car fresh off the production line. It took us a little over a minute to go from a standstill to 206mph. That's extraordinary. Even when you break through the 200mph barrier, the GT Speed just keeps accelerating."
The GT Speed Grand Tourer reached v-max in just 76 seconds, covering a distance of 9.4 kilometres in the process. At top speed, the 6.0-litre twin-turbo Grand Tourer was covering a staggering 92 metres (or one football pitch) per second.
At v-max the GT Speed is circulating 216 litres of coolant through its engine and radiator per minute; drawing over 4,700 litres of air through its radiator each second; and using 80 per cent of its engine power just to overcome aerodynamic loads.
The beauty of this is that Bentley wasn't trying to set a record nor score points in some championship. It just did it to show what the Conti GT is capable of...