Bentley Flying Spur review

Welcome to the driver’s seat. It’s a lot like the Continental GT in here, with enveloping seats, a commanding driving position, better forward visibility than you were anticipating, and little (if any) sense that there’s an enormous amount of car both in front and behind you. The nose drops away, making it tricky to tell if your Flying B motif is raised or lowered. But hardly core to the driving experience.

And of course the powertrain is as per the Continental GT too. Meaning, like the whole car, it's capable of being both awesomely exhilarating and supremely relaxing.

You can press a button and get full-electric drive if there's charge in the battery. In that mode, there's enough performance for pretty well any chauffeur duty – one doesn't want any spillages from the champagne flutes in the rear.

Even when the battery's depleted (or you're on an arterial road but holding its charge for when you arrive in a city) the engine revs often drop to zero and then resume a few seconds later. But it's so quiet in that sort of driving, and the transition so smoothly managed, that you don't notice.

It's a delightfully quiet, woofly engine at middle pace too. You're borne above puffy clouds on the wings of Pegasus. With the long-travel accelerator, you might wonder where the full drama lies.

Well, dip your toe further into those deep waters and feel the brutally powerful currents beneath. The transmission drops ratios, the turbos spool up, the revs rise and the blistering performance soars.

If you twist the mode dial to sports, the engine never shuts down, and the transmission is more alert to its lower gears, so the big-power regime is more accessible. You can also use the paddles to do a downshift in anticipation of a corner or overtake.

The complex system of electricity, clutches, gears and turbos all acts in terrific harmony. So this is a powertrain brilliant for urban trickling, mountain-pass blasting, motorway cruising and everything in between.

The rest of the Flying Spur’s driving experience is downright impressive and the 48-volt electrics and new-improved adaptive dampers are the making of it. The active anti-roll technology works more naturally here than in any other car we’ve tried it in – permitting soft springs without the penalty of excessive body roll – and combined with the four-wheel steering it helps the car feel lighter, more agile and more manageable than anything nudging 2,700kg has any right to.

Can you treat it like a sports car?

Accelerate through a corner and you don’t get terminal understeer, but instead all four wheels working hard. Sport mode is especially rear-biased in its power delivery, with the fronts only getting 31 per cent of available torque.

Crucially, the differences between its driving modes are marked. Of course it’s whisper-quiet inside. Of course the ambience lifts it above any German marque. You expect all that from a big Bentley saloon. But what sets this one apart is its bandwidth: the fact that with a twist of a knob it can behave like either a limousine or sports saloon.

Heart of the matter for a true luxury car, the ride in the non-sport modes is notably improved over the 2019-24 version. Not quite up with the Rolls-Royce Ghost, but better than anything built in any other country than Britain.

What about the driver assist?

The new electronics on the 2025 Flying Spur enable assisted driving at the highest level the VW/Porsche Group can provide. They work well and are easily switched in and out. But bizarrely on a quarter-million-pound car they come in an optional pack.

Mind you, Bentley reckons that for a century it has been building what are in effect autonomous cars with full remote-parking and summon functionality. Because their owners have always employed a chauffeur.