Ride of the Valkyries. Bentley GT Speed

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Long story short, we ended up here – at the Intercontinental hotel in Berchtesgaden. This is an area most famous for Germany’s darkest time – Hitler had his Alpine retreat, the Berghof, at Berchtesgaden. It still attracts tourists today, but we’re too busy for that. We’ve only time for a press conference and dinner before bed, ahead of an early start the following day.

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And what a day it is. The rain has gone, replaced overnight by snow, and incredible low clouds at dawn.

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We’re up above, looking down at a sea of cotton wool below the Alpine peaks.

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It’s pretty darn beautiful.

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But enough of that, we’ve got Alpine roads to thrash along. It’s much clearer today, the sun is shining and the waving ribbons of tarmac are awesome. After yesterday’s green shenanigans, today we’re in the yellow peril.

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On these roads, with the ground-hugging clouds dispersing, I can finally see if the GT Speed is merely a straight-line wunderkind, or if it actually performs on the twisties as well. This is, after all, a bloody heavy car, tipping the scales at close to 2.5 tonnes.

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The results are… well, mixed. First, the good stuff. The GT is astoundingly well composed on pretty much every type of road. It was rock solid at speed on the Autobahn, and it does a superb job of hiding its weight here as well. Sure, it’s heavy. Chuck it hard into a corner and the front tyres will express their full disapproval and then give up. You have to be realistic. Nurse it in the bends and it feels meaty and responsive, but you won’t get a heavyweight boxer to start doing double backflips.

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With four wheel drive and all that torque, it’s ridiculously muscular out of bends. Even on the still-damp roads today, it hauls ass when you open the steering up, the gearbox quick to respond in both auto and manual modes. It’s not got the seamless, instant switch of a double clutch affair, but it never feels too slow.

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The downside? Well, it’s the throttle. In any car with sporting pretensions, you need a snappy throttle, one that you can use to adjust the balance of the car at the limit. In both GT Speeds I drove, the throttle was responsive on depress, but let it off and it’s sluggish to the point of lethargy. Releasing the pedal should instantly result in the revs dropping, but it doesn’t – it hangs there, barely registering that it’s not being pressed any more. This means that midway through a corner, when I want to lift slightly to allow the nose to tuck in, nothing happens. Instead, I find myself left-foot braking when I really shouldn’t need to.

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A chat with an engineer suggests that this is a quirk of these pre-production model, and that the final car, the one people will buy, will have this characteristic sorted. I hope it will, as aside from that the GT Speed is really impressive. Fast, agile, exquisitely made by master craftsmen, and effortless in wracking up the kilometres. The throttle issue is my only real niggle with the car – once Bentley fix it, it’ll be fit to take its rightful place at the head of the Continental GT range.

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Pics by Phill Tromans and Matt German