The new Bentley Continental GT Speed surpasses its top-ranking predecessor

It ought to be easy to write about the new, fourth generation Bentley Continental GT and GTC Speed. As regular as clockwork, Bentley updates and overhauls its flagship grand tourer every few years, adding in new technology, burnishing the capabilities and expressive outlets of its team of craftspeople and generally making things faster, smoother, more efficient and, well, better.

Given that the last iteration of the GT was pretty good, all that remains is to mark this new one down as excellent. Job done, then? In many respects, yes. Bentley furnished us with brand new examples of both the GT and the convertible GTC, put Wallpaper* up in a cavernous suite in The Chedi Andermatt and somehow contrived to find excellent weather for around 200km of very fine, clear Swiss alpine passes. It was fabulous.

So why is this car so good? The GT was the car that transformed Bentley’s fortunes, turning it from a manufacturer of staid-looking but brutishly fast performance grand tourers and saloons, the latter closely related to offerings from then sister company Rolls-Royce. The Volkswagen Group acquired the prestigious pair in 1998 but in 2003 there was a great schism in luxury motoring, and the Rolls-Royce name (and name only) fell under the control of BMW. VW retained the historic factory at Crewe and decades of engineering and craft experience, albeit much that was stuck several generations in the past.

The very first Continental GT went on sale in 2003 having debuted the year before at the Paris Motor Show. The car represented a massive investment and a considerable leap of faith for the VW Group, driven through in part by the persistence of Adrian Hallmark, then Bentley’s Board Member responsible for Sales & Marketing and later to be the company’s CEO from 2018 to 2024. Hallmark had the backing of influential VW Group chairman Ferdinand Piëch, a trained engineer whose career was marked by resource-hungry prestige projects.

That first generation car was a huge success. Priced at around £110,000, it instantly broadened Bentley’s demographic, lowering the typical owner’s average age, and reaching into new markets. The model was then given a massive update in 2011, by which point it was clear that Bentley considered the GT to be akin to its ‘911’, an evergreen model name that could last for generations as it became the vessel for new advances in styling and technology.

The following year, Bentley equipped the GT with a V8 engine, a model that sat alongside the W12 powertrain that had been with the car since its inception (another piece of Piëch’s engineering largesse). In 2018, the Continental GT was thoroughly refreshed once again to create the third generation car.

That all-new platform survives beneath this fourth generation model, but the W12 has finally gone. From now onwards, the only available powertrain is a twin-turbo Hybrid V8, one that’s shared with the new Flying Spur. With 782 PS , the Speed model (which at the time of writing is the only GT and GTC available) is the most powerful production car Bentley has ever made.

Despite this plethora of power, the Continental preserves decorum by defaulting to electric mode when you start it. The battery is a modest 25.9 kWh, but it should be good for around 50 miles of pure EV drive, as well as provide the all-important electric boost to the V8 and its twin turbos. That’s where the headline power figure comes from, and the hybrid system (also found in Porsche’s closely related Panamera) provides a number of drive modes, including a regeneration function that puts miles back on the battery when you’re cruising at speed.

The powertrain is better in literally every way than the original W12, and still manages to sound ferocious when pushed hard. Bentley points out that 'no artificial noise enhancement is added in the cabin,' unlike other manufacturers who have been known to subtly boost the sound of an engine through the audio system.

The GT has always been a handsome car, although Bentley’s attempts to crystalise its weighty handsomeness into a three-pronged design ethos – ‘resting beast,’ ‘upright elegance’ and ‘endless bonnet’ – feels a little forced. Suffice to say that the GT’s resting beast face is attached to a truly elegant car, a machine that takes full advantage of its mighty scale to create excellent proportions.

The design, which was unveiled earlier this summer, soars rather close to the lofty heights of the Bentley Batur. This ultra-bespoke iteration of the GT, built in an edition of just 18 , along with the open-topped Bentley Bacalar (built an edition of 12), foreshadowed the new single headlight details of the GT, a departure from the four headlight face the car has had since its inception.

The Swiss launch provided the first chance to get behind the wheel of the uprated car. The uninitiated would be forgiven for thinking that a machine weighing in at nearly 2.5 tons is too substantial to have any sporting aptitude, ill-suited to the twisting hairpins of the Alps would. Instead, the location was a measure of Bentley’s confidence in the new Continental GT. In the hands of a vastly more experienced driver than us, this big machine hustled its way up, down and across four of the country’s most spectacular mountain passes, never once feeling anything less than perfectly planted and devastatingly quick.

Active all-wheel drive is paired with a veritable armoury of clever ride and dynamic control systems to keep the car feeling planting, lithe and way smaller than its physical size would suggest. The air damped suspension has been tweaked to make the comfort setting plusher and more pliable, without compromising the solid, unyielding stability you need in sport mode. In short, The GT (and its open-topped GTC sibling) is an amazing, beautiful thing, and it's hard to begrudge anyone who’s chosen to deploy the conspicuous amount of funds required to acquire one.

As it was in the beginning, the Continental is a grand tourer that’s also an extremely capable sports car. For the most part, the 100,000 or so models sold over the past two decades have gone to those who favour the former, not the latter. This is particularly evident with the GTC, a machine pitched at the boulevards of Miami and Malibu, not the twistier spots of central Europe. That’s largely because Bentley has ensured that luxury, craft and technology have always been a core part of the GT’s character.

The interior is largely unchanged from the Generation Three cars, but is still one of the best of any contemporary car, luxury or otherwise. There are gimmicky but rewardingly fun elements like the tri-rotating central dash display, which flips from the screen to dials to nothing, and of course plenty of scope for the chromatically challenged to wreak havoc on the meticulously assembled dash structure and interior surfaces, courtesy of Bentley’s Mulliner customisation division.

For generation four, the Continental GT gets an all-new electrical architecture, taking on board current ADAS (Advanced driver-assistance systems) regulations. We’re not sure how useful ‘Intelligent Park Assist’ will be in the Bentley’s world of valet parking and expansive driveways. An even more superfluous a party trick is ‘Remote Park Assist’, which allows you to remotely manoeuvre the car using the Bentley app on your phone. Other innovations have a quiet common sense, like the intelligent air conditioning that automatically switches to recirculation mode when it detects you’re in a long tunnel.

The most important modern technology of all, pure EV drive, is notable by its absence. Like many other luxury car makers, Bentley has seemingly moved its electrification programme over to the slow lane now that hybrids are enjoying a late renaissance amongst luxury car buyers. Although the company claims to be still on track to show its first pure EV in 2026 – and promises that it won’t be a replacement for an existing car – the strength and flexibility of the Continental GT’s hybrid drive offers the majority of customers all that they need for now.

Plug-in hybrids are no longer a transitional technology but actually something very desirable, the automotive equivalent of having your cake and eating it. The GT Speed can be a smooth, silent electric running machine that'll glide into a mews in the early hours without waking the neighbours, as well as a rabid, snarling sports car with acceleration that outpaces most EVs and improbably high top speed of 208 mph.

It’s not uncontroversial to say the GT is too fast even for an autobahn, that last bulwark of automotive libertarianism. Despite that lurid, headline-grabbing figure and the bragging that’ll inevitably accompany it, the new Bentley Continental GT Speed represents a colossal achievement, a new summit for luxury motoring.

Bentley Continental GT Speed, prices from £250,000+, BentleyMotors.com, @BentleyMotors

Wallpaper* stayed at The Chedi Andermatt, courtesy of Bentley Motors, TheChediAndermatt