Mulsanne Speed proves the perfect luxury road-trip companion
In 1930, Bentley chairman, diamond heir, professional rich person and “Bentley Boy” Joel Woolf Barnato raced his Speed Six against the famous Blue Train across France from Cannes to Calais, outpacing the train so handily that he went on to The Conservative Club in London before the train reached Calais. The details of the story vary depending on who tells it, but it has always been an essential piece of Bentley lore, perfectly encapsulating the romance that carried the Bentley name through almost a century of playing second fiddle to its former owner, Rolls-Royce.
The modern Bentley, a subsidiary of Volkswagen, leans hard on the association with that golden era between its founding in 1919 and its acquisition in 1931. If you’ve ever been around a Bentley of that era—and if you haven’t, you should, because nothing else is quite as cool—you’re struck first by the scale. Hula-hoop wheels! Chest-high bonnet! 4 1/2-liter. Blower. 6 1/2-liter. 8-LITER six! Then your imagination really starts running: You visualize crashing through the damp wind at 125 mph in such an upright, serious machine, on narrow little tires and with mechanical drum brakes. Just imagine ripping by an Austin Seven as it putters along, charmingly, its occupants innocent and unspoiled by the knowledge of unimaginable speed. It takes how long to get to Calais? Ha! I’ll decide how long it takes!
This is the dream of Bentley ownership: total mastery of all the world’s paved surfaces and a measure of mastery over distance and time. And in the 2015 Mulsanne Speed, that dream is alive. At least, that’s the conclusion I’ve come to after using one to drive round-trip from Detroit to Denver.
Essential background: Over last Christmas, I got drunk and promised that I’d drive my fiancée and her folks to Denver for her brother’s wedding. Drunk or not, I said I could/would do it, and damn it, I was going to do it; just like Woolf Barnato and the train race, right down to the fact that no one was especially keen to take me up on my offer.
See, when Barnato proposed his bet, everyone basically looked around and said, “Yeah, Woolf, we know you’ll smoke the train, we get it. Sleep this one off, pal,” because two other, lesser cars had already bested the sad old Blue Train. In the weeks after I proposed a 3,000-mile road trip, the fact that Detroit-to-Denver plane tickets are reliably around $ 200 was the subject of some discussion. But, if you drive, you can stop and smoke whenever you want and you don’t have to submit to degradation and/or molestation in service of some notion of security.
Plus, I said I’d look into borrowing the perfect road-trip car.
The Bentley Mulsanne Speed is a 6,000-pound leather- and lacquer-lined limousine that accelerates as quickly and as smoothly as it would if it were shoved out the back of a plane. It’s like flooring a Tesla, except no one screams “NERD!” at you from the sidewalk. The thing that allows the car to behave this way is torque—811 lb-ft of buttery twisting force. It comes from two turbos and a 6.75-liter V8 that has been in service since it was introduced by Bentley and Rolls-Royce in 1959. It is a god among engines.
Tilt your foot down, and it will smite the miles ahead of you just as surely as a giant hand from the sky.
With the Mulsanne Speed, Bentley has built a vehicle that occupies a class of its own—the cars that compete in terms of performance are comparatively small, and the cars that compete in size are comparatively slow.
If you want a car that outweighs a base Ford F-150 by nearly 2,000 luxurious pounds and is capable of a sub-five-second run to 60 mph and tops out at 190 mph, look no further. Really, though, look no further—there isn’t anything else out there.
The Mulsanne’s rear seats are as comfortable as car seats get. They’re where you put an anxious groom, where you invite your favorite wedding guests to sit and play with the champagne flutes and the desks with the iPads built right into them. But this isn’t a Rolls-Royce; the best seat in the house is the one with the wheel and pedals.
That’s still the whole point of a Bentley.
