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Antique Road Show: What would Andy Warhol drive? This.
This road test may be irrelevant. Which wouldn’t necessarily make it unique to the pages of C/D. This time, however, it isn’t our fault. See, Bentley is going to create only 550 Brooklands—delivering the final one toward the end of 2009—and 549 of them are already spoken for. The grand-touring coupe you see on these pages, in a color Bentley calls “Porcelain,” is the last copy for sale. Or was at the time this was written.
But don’t sweat it. You probably couldn’t afford one anyway. The base Brooklands, including its $4500 guzzler tax, will set you back $348,085, “but practically no one is going out the door spending less than 400 grand,” notes Bentley’s PR guy. That’s because you’ll want add-ons like a $3190 retractable Flying B hood ornament, and you’d be crazy not to mix and match your Mulliner cockpit veneers—burr oak, burr walnut, bird’s-eye maple, olive ash, vavona, madrona, possibly even plywood—and any 5980-pound flagship wouldn’t be caught dead without the optional carbon-ceramic brake rotors, which will lighten your wallet by $29,270. (Right now, the reader may wish to reflect on vehicular purchases available to him for the cost of this car’s brakes alone.)
Your average Brooklands buyer owns eight automobiles and is worth $30 million. As such, he doesn’t buy the car himself. He sends a minion to buy it for him. So when the salesman says, “Jeez, I’ll have to go ask my manager,” the buyer probably replies, “That won’t be necessary.”
Alas, where to drive a car that so boldly proclaims, “I am super-goddamn rich”? Simple: to the Grand Rapids Art Museum, featuring 100 examples of Andy Warhol’s art. Warhol was joyfully unrepentant about extending the fame of moneyed celebrities while simultaneously worshipping at the cathedral that is Chase Manhattan Bank. “It’s great to buy friends,” he said. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having a lot of money and attracting people with it. Look who you’re attracting: everybody!”
As we cruised at 80 mph toward the museum, the big car’s trunk mysteriously popped open on its own, disgorging a London Fog coat upon the wet surface of Interstate 96. Did we care? We did not! No longer the hoi polloi, at least for a day, we blithely dismissed so puny a setback. As Warhol would have put it, “Always omit the blemishes—they’re not part of the good picture you want.” Then he added, “The best way I like to carry money, actually, is messily. Crumpled wads. A paper bag is good.”
All 18 feet of the Brooklands is a close cousin to the convertible Azure but with a hard roof hand-welded into place, a process requiring 110 hours of flying sparks. Both cars trace their Crewe-cut roots to the Arnage, launched in the ’90s, and all three are thus the old-style “true British” Bentleys, untainted by the Johnny-come-lately VW engineers who were responsible for the Continental Flying Spur, GTC, and GT. The latter drive like modern supercars. The former drive like really, really fast Olds 98 Regencys. Well, that’s an exaggeration, but keep in mind that the twin-turbo, pushrod 6.75-liter V-8, a derivative of a Packard design, has been in constant use since 1959, a year when Warhol—known as the “white mole of Union Square”—was still churning out ink drawings of shoes for ads.
But what an engine it is, producing 774 pound-feet of torque at just 3200 rpm, which isn’t all that far from its 4600-rpm redline—statistics you’d expect to find in a Caterpillar brochure. At step-off, the V-8 more or less ignores the first inch of pedal travel, but the second inch induces a leap and a roar not unlike what Siegfried & Roy experienced just prior to forced retirement. At wide-open throttle, the Brooklands and a four-cylinder Ford Fusion emit the same quantity of noise. Sixty mph arrives in 5.0 seconds, and the quarter-mile is dispatched in 13.3 seconds, same as a Porsche Cayman S, which could act as a dinghy for this car. Disable the traction control, and you can transform the 20-inch rear Pirellis into a cloud of smoke so immense that emergency calls will be placed to the U.S. Forest Service. That, of course, would be a wasteful display. But we have money, dammit, and the cure for shredded tires is mere cash. “I don’t think everybody should have money,” Warhol noted, “ . . . you wouldn’t know who was important. How boring.”
The steering is heavy and uncommunicative, mostly serving as a reminder of the mass the driver is shepherding. Turn-in is slow—all that tonnage doesn’t much want to change course—so a series of back-to-back hairpins leaves this Bentley somewhat befuddled. On the other hand, it’s quite at home in fast, open sweepers, where it takes a confident set, displays minimal body roll, and requires few path corrections. In fact, its skidpad grip matches a Benz E63 AMG’s. But in the hills, the Brooklands mostly feels a whole bunch like a big sporty SUV—say, a Porsche Cayenne or a BMW X5, with the same borderline-choppy ride, particularly when its electronically controlled shocks are in sport mode.
The brake pedal is mushier than The Way We Were, but at least the vast rotors bring everything to a straight-and-drama-free stop in only 173 feet, and the hotter they become, the better they seem to perform. This prompts pointless panic stops just to remind riders your brakes cost $29,270. “Money is the moment to me,” said Warhol. “Money is my mood.”
As is true of all Bentleys, the cockpit of the Brooklands is the celestial zenith of sumptuous excess, a visual feast comprising glittering stainless steel, wool carpets deep enough to swallow dimes, mirror-like walnut, and so much leather—including the entire headliner—that it’s less accurate to speak of hides than herds. It takes 19 hours to stitch the leather steering wheel alone. Oddly, both front seats are aggressively bolstered but low, with legroom that may not satisfy occupants taller than six feet. Where you most want to reside, frankly, is in either of the heated rear seats, where each passenger holds dominion over his own HVAC vent, reading lamp, and lumbar support. Better yet, the rear seats electronically recline so far as to encourage naps in which you dream your aunt is the Queen. In this coupe, back-seat riders even get their own dedicated door handles so that no Hugo Boss pants are split during an awkward reach forward.
Did we mention that the Brooklands requires two batteries—one to spin over the V-8, the other to power all the accessories? “I don’t understand anything except green bills,” said Warhol, who would have required quite a few to support the fuel habit of the Brooklands.
Within or without this vehicle, there’s but one surface that isn’t pleasing to the touch, and that’s the radio’s plastic faceplate. Warhol would have forgiven it. “I love Hollywood,” he said. “Everybody’s plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic.”
Only 180 Brooklands will find homes in U.S. garages. Given the hundreds of options—your family crest embroidered on the seats, for instance, or a karaoke machine, or wood trim from a tree grown in your own yard, or a billet-aluminum fuel cap, or Mary Kay–pink paint—no two will be identical, making the Brooklands an instant collectible in America. “American money is very well designed,” noted Warhol. “I’ve thrown it in the East River down by the Staten Island Ferry just to see it float.”
Notice, however, that of the 10,014 Bentleys sold worldwide last year, 9200 were based on the VW-derived Continental architecture, suggesting that the die-hard Bentley-istas are, well, dying hard. The Brooklands marks finis for the Arnage platform, which, in turn, marks the end of the last Bentley that, say, Richard Burton would have recognized.
Little does it matter that the Brooklands is an eccentric and archaic thing to drive. It’s easy to overlook the noisy wipers and the stiff pushbutton door handles. And the proof is 549 customers who’ve already written checks in the $400,000 range. (“Checks aren’t money,” insisted Warhol.) So, our nitpicking will be of piddling concern to Bentley’s CFO, whose hand is likely cramped from filling out deposit slips. Warhol should have written ads for Bentley. “Making money is art,” he wrote, “and working is art, and good business is the best art.”
Highs: As rare as moon rocks, a cockpit so sumptuous they’ll have to drag you out.
Lows: Mushy brake pedal, fuel economy of a WWII battleship, MSRP of $348,085.
The Verdict: Last chance to buy a flagship old-school Bentley. Whoops, too late.
2009 Bentley Brooklands - Road Test/Ultra Luxury Lounge/High Performance/Hot Lists/Reviews/Car and Driver - Car And Driver
What a beautiful, beautiful car. This is real "exclusivity".
M
Would be a stunning car…
