Bentley Brooklands, 2008

 

 

 

 

•  Bentley Brooklands, 2008

The Bentley Brooklands is a stunning new model that marks the company's return to the luxury coupé market and reaffirms its reputation as creator of the world's most exclusive coupés. It is the ultimate Bentley: a stylish, four-seat, grand touring coupe with classic British proportions and muscular performance.

Bentley's chairman Dr Franz-Josef Paefgen describes the motivation behind the new coupé: "Bentley's proud sporting pedigree, forged by the exploits of the immortal 'Bentley Boys' on the famous Brooklands racetrack in the 1920s, was the inspiration for our new coupé, capturing all the style, power and splendour of that era."

Sporting design cues are matched by the phenomenal performance engineering of Bentley's legendary Crewe-built V8 engine. The new Bentley Brooklands possesses the most powerful V8 the company has ever produced - a 530bhp, twin-turbocharged 6.75-litre unit that also produces a prodigious 1050Nm of torque.

Each Bentley Brooklands coupé  hand-assembled, employing traditional coach-building techniques and the craftsmanship skills in wood veneer and leather hide for which Bentley is renowned. To ensure exclusivity, lifetime production will be strictly limited to just 550 cars, with deliveries expected to start in the first half of 2008.

Exterior Design: Classic British Proportions
Bentley's rich coupé heritage provided the stimulus for Director of Styling, Dirk van Braeckel and his design team. For van Braeckel, the task was very clear: "To create a powerful, muscular and rakish grand touring coupé with classic British proportions, in the finest Bentley tradition."

While the new Bentley Brooklands is influenced by Bentley's fine coupé lineage, its design and engineering are thoroughly contemporary. The proportions of long bonnet, short front overhang and long rear overhang achieve the design objective perfectly, while the low roofline, steeply raked screens and pillarless side glass convey both power and movement.

The 'floating' rear screen, for example, is a contemporary take on traditional coachbuilt Bentleys. The lower edge of the screen sits well above the upper edge of the boot lid to provide a flowing, flawless line to the back of the car. This can only be achieved by individually hand-welding the rear wings to the C-pillars.