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2018 Bentley Continental Supersports | More exciting than space travel

For the final song on their delightfully buoyant and mordant 1996 album This is a Long Drive for Someone with Nothing to Think About, Pacific Northwest indie rock band Modest Mouse penned an even more cynical response to David Bowie's already nihilistic ode to interstellar flight, "Space Oddity" The song imagines the life of a lonely female passenger on a flight to some distant lunar satellite, lost in post-gravitational anomie ("She's the only rocketeer in the whole damn place/They gave her a mirror so she could talk to her face.") Dreading the endless blankness of her voyage as much as the senseless achievement of reaching its destination, the unnamed woman wishes she could just read a dime-store novel and return home. It is titled, poignantly, " Space Travel is Boring." We recently visited the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, NASA's literal launch pad for the Apollo missions and the Space Shuttle. Since there are currently no rockets going up, Space Florida's Shuttle Landing Facility did us the favor and allowed us to use the 3.5-mile-long runway built for the Shuttle — literally, the longest stretch of underutilized, perfectly straight, perfectly paved roadway in the world — for a series of automotive maneuvers. Our vehicle of choice was the $293,300 2018 Bentley Continental Supersports. This was decidedly not boring. The Supersports is an enhanced version of an already extremely potent vehicle. Featuring an upgraded crankshaft, torque converter, and turbochargers for more power and improved power delivery, the Supersports' 6.0-liter W12 engine produces an even 700 horsepower, and 750 lb-ft of torque. That makes this the most powerful and fastest Bentley ever made. Sixty miles per hour is dispatched in 3.4 seconds on the way to a maximum velocity of 209 mph. The largest carbon ceramic brakes of any production car come as standard equipment, as do carbon fiber hood vents, front splitter and rear air diffuser, side trim, and a planed long-board of a rear wing. Handsome 21-inch lightweight forged wheels are also part of the package, though, really, weight savings is almost irrelevant in this vehicle. The Supersports weighs over 2.5 tons, or about as much as one of the tread belt shoes on the diesel/electric crawler used to tug the 70-million-pound Space Shuttle and its boosters out onto Canaveral's runway. We were tugged out onto the runway as well, though in a slightly different fashion.

Bentley preps 'Centennary Specification' for all models built in 2019

For the entirety of Bentley's 100th year in business, the English carmaker will adorn its products with a Centenary Specification. The package consists of unique badging with specially developed Centenary Gold badge highlights, available Centenary Gold thread for the headrest logos, contrast stitching and cross stitching, and a "centenary welcome light" outside the vehicle. The in-house craftsmen have also developed unique embroidery. Bentley says the gold hue was inspired by metalwork on vintage models like the 1919 EXP 2 (pictured, red and silver) and 1929 Birkin Blower (pictured, green), the latter one of the company's Le Mans winners driven by Sir Henry "Tim" Birkin. The hue possesses an "elegant warm tone and a deep fluid shadow." The steering wheel badge, key fob, shift knob, and wheel center caps feature the tinted ring. The "B" badge on the radiator surround also features "1919-2019" script, and that script is found on the tread plates, too. For those who don't know, eponymous founder Walter Owen Bentley's engineering career began with locomotives — which he loved more than cars at one point — and motorcycles, before settling on automobiles. He bought his first car in 1910, a French DFP, and after improving it himself, set a 10-lap record at the Brooklands circuit. In 1912 he opened a DFP franchise with his brother Horace Milner as Bentley & Bentley, and further upgraded the car with a new piston design that was 88 percent aluminum and 12 percent copper. The Royal Naval Air Service adopted Bentley's piston design and Bentley's re-designed Clerget airplane engines, dubbed the Bentley Rotary. After the war, Bentley refocused on cars, and in 1919 released the 3-Litre, which boasted features like a cross-flow head, overhead cams working four valves per cylinder, and twin plugs in each cylinder. The company delivered the first production model in 1921, then went racing and won the second edition of Le Mans in 1924. That is how Bentley began to become "Bentley, ahem ...", and here we are. Next year, on July 10, the company plans to celebrate the feat appropriately. Related Video:

Pre-Race notes from the 2015 Nurburgring 24-Hours

Autoblog has come to the German countryside to watch the Nurburgring 24-Hour race, and just one day in, we have to say it's outstanding. Le Mans has been the highlight of our summer racing schedule for the past few years, the 'Ring 24-Hour event being the appetizer we always skipped. Earlier this year, however, while visiting Miami to check out the Cigarette Racing 50 Marauder GT S, we met Scott Preacher. He oversees digital marketing for both Cigarette and AMG during the week, then comes to Germany to compete in the VLN race series on the weekends, driving an Aston Martin Vantage GT4 for Team Mathol. If Le Mans is the Oscars of endurance racing, the Nurburgring 24-Hour race is the Screen Actors Guild award – the one voted on by the actors, for the actors. In this case it's the race by the teams and fans, for the teams and fans, even though the increasing manufacturer presence has altered the team equation. We were told that it wasn't so long ago that true privateers could win the overall, but that's not really the case anymore. Front-running teams have heavy factory involvement – Audi Sport Team Phoenix, for instance, which finished in first and third last year, has its own 'Ring race center and is running the 2016 R8; Aston Martin is represented by Aston Martin Racing and Aston Martin Test Center, and Bentley has a Bentley Motors team and uses HPT to run another team. The fan component hasn't changed, though, and you can't talk about the race for more than 60 seconds before someone brings up the battalions of spectators. Every driver we spoke to cited them as the most incredible part of this race after the track itself. It feels to us like a giant German Sebring, with thousands of people camped out in the ginormous, forested infield, many of whom have been here since Monday erecting their ornate camping compounds. There will be parties everywhere Saturday night, and so much bratwurst on the grill that the drivers can smell it when as they're blasting full speed through Wehrseifen. Even when we drove a Mercedes S63 AMG Coupe on a lap before the race, the fans waved like it was a competition. Scott Preacher's Australian co-driver Robert Thompson said, "You come around a corner and it's like you're driving full speed through the middle of a carnival." The race field itself could also be called a carnival, with an officially invited field of more than 170 cars. Even on a track that's 24.4-km long, that's like racing on the 405 at midday.