Road test: Bentley Continental GT3-R

Bentley’s latest model is a venomous limited-edition marvel.

Bentley’s GT3-R, seen in action at Yas Marina Circuit in the capital. Only 300 of these cars will be made. Courtesy Bentley Motors

That noise. It’s totally incongruous with the car that flashes past doing well over the double-ton. The thunderous avalanche of decibels simply can’t be spewing out of the tailpipes of a Bentley. There’s nothing restrained about it … it’s full of venom.

I’m standing in the pit-lane at Yas Marina Circuit and the white projectile with green swoosh stripes that’s generating this aural assault rockets past again. Quite clearly, the Continental GT3-R is cut from a very different kind of cloth than the rest of the fast but genteel Bentley line-up.

Deriving its inspiration – but not too much in terms of mechanicals – from the GT3 race car that’s enjoying healthy success in the FIA Blancpain series, the GT3-R is a discernibly harder­-edged weapon than its stablemates, so much so that a Conti V8S feels like a weak-kneed, roly-poly blancmange by comparison. More on this later.

Just 300 examples of the GT3-R will be rolled out by Bentley, with the 46 allocated for the Middle East already spoken for – and this is despite a sticker price that’s likely to be not far off double the Dh800,000-plus ask for a V8S.

The good news for me is that I’m about to strap into the GT3-R. The bad news is that I’ll be in the passenger seat, albeit alongside a highly capable steerer – an affable chap named Peter Barnes – the Bentley boys have brought along to dish out high-speed taxi rides. The PR bods’ reasoning goes something like this: “We have only one car, and it has to travel around the world for demos, so we have to protect it.” Bah.

Once clear of the pit-lane, Barnes stands on the gas and the GT3-R accelerates with surprising vigour. Although it’s propelled by essentially the same 4.0-litre twin-turbo engine as the V8S, remapped engine software and an increase in boost pressure ramp up power and torque to 572bhp and 700Nm (compared to 521bhp and 680Nm for the V8S).

This in itself isn’t worth shouting about, but when you factor in that the GT3-R tips the scales 100 kilograms lighter than the V8S (albeit at a still weighty 2,195kg), and that its eight-speed auto runs shorter gearing, the result is a pretty lively package. Bentley quotes a 0-100kph split of 3.8 seconds, and from where I sit that sounds eminently plausible.

The only drawback of the shorter gearing is that top speed is reduced to just 275kph, where the V8S will do 310. Does this really matter? I think not, unless you’re on a racetrack with a decent straight, or a particularly deserted stretch of highway with no speed cameras, but I didn’t say that.

As for the GT3-R’s barking-mad sonic signature (which sounds just as tasty from inside the car), that’s the result of a bespoke titanium exhaust system that weighs 7kg less than the standard pipes. The straight-line grunt and musical accompaniment is an eye-opener, but much more so is how flat the GT3-R sits through corners, particularly for a 2.2-tonne heavy­weight, and how effectively it hooks up to the tarmac and converts that torque into forward motion. The keys here are much firmer suspension tuning, a torque-vectoring system and a recalibrated stability-control safety net that also allows for more sideways tomfoolery than the standard set-up.

The ceramic brakes also haul the car up with urgency, but need to be cooled off on the second lap after the pounding they receive on our out lap. The cool-off lap gives me time to gather my thoughts, and what I’m thinking is: “This is pretty damn impressive for a car that’s essentially a big comfy grand tourer with all the trimmings.”

With a Lamborghini or Ferrari, you expect to go fast on a track (by road car standards). That’s what they’re designed to do. Bentleys are not. And just to reinforce this point, I take a V8S onto the circuit immediately after and it feels a world apart – soft, wallowy and short on grip. In fact, it’s hard to believe the GT3-R is 90 per cent the same car underneath.

While the GT3-R has a strong visual link to Bentley’s GT3 race car with its bonnet vents, go-faster stripes, glacier white paintwork, gloss-black 21-inch rims, carbon-fibre diffuser and rear wing, that’s pretty much where the similarity ends, as the stripped-out Blancpain racer weighs just 1,295kg and sends all its power to the rear wheels via an Xtrac six-speed sequential gearbox.

It hardly matters. The GT3-R is plenty hard enough to entertain even the most serious of punters, and few of the fortunate 46 in the Middle East are likely to feel short-changed.

Seems you can have your cake and eat it, after all.

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