Don't Stop Me Now
Bentley Arnage
It’s a no-brainer really. If you want to spend a very great deal of money on a nice car, you have to buy an Aston Martin DB9, which looks and sounds better than anything else on the road.
I suppose, maybe, that if you wanted to spend a very great deal of money and then another £70,000 on top, you could have a Ferrari 612 Scaglietti which, as Top Gear has just proved, can get from Surrey to Verbier faster than a plane.
Either way, there’s certainly no need to go off and buy that enormous Volkswagen they call the Bentley Continental GT. Yes, it’s quiet and, yes, it’s beautifully made, but it’s not that pretty, not that fast and really not that spacious. What’s more, Ryan Giggs has one.
Not just Ryan Giggs either, but also Kieron Dyer, Rio Ferdinand, Gary Neville, Nicky Butt and the Middlesbrough striker, Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink. Do you want people to think you are a footballer? Really? Well, why not have your brains sucked out through your ears and move to Cheshire and have some friends over this evening to roast your cleaning lady? (Not that the aforementioned players would, of course.)
You may point out at this stage that the Continental is not only sold to footballers, and that Dale Winton also has one. But I wouldn’t if I were you. What I would do, if I had set my heart on owning the world’s fastest lorry, is ignore the GT coupé and instead take a closer look at its four-door stablemate, the Arnage.
I’ve just spent a week with this leviathan and was fascinated by the meat cleaver that it took to Britain’s increasingly blurred class system. The security guards at the BBC nodded a reverential nod and, for the first time in 15 years, waved me on to the premises without even looking at their clipboards. It was the same story on a shoot with Lord This and Your Grace That. Here, at the other end of the social scale, the Bentley was also much admired.
But in the centre ground things were rather different. At one party filled with blonde stick insects and men in loafers, it was universally agreed that the Arnage was as vulgar as Wayne Rooney’s lounge carpet. Interesting, that. It seems the middle classes have no interest in the Bentley brand, and for that reason alone it’s worth ploughing on.
And ploughing’s the right word, because when you climb inside an Arnage and close the door, you’ll think you’ve gone back about 200 years. Today’s car designers are extraordinarily adept at eking out the very last cubic inch of space from even the tiniest body. But the Bentley was from a time when they didn’t bother, and as a result it’s microscopic in there.
At first you imagine the seat is not all the way back, so you start to hunt for the button that will engage the motor. Half an hour later, after you’ve pushed everything that can be pushed and prodded everything that can be prodded, you will locate the seat controls in a cubbyhole beneath the centre armrests. And at that point you’ll find, to your horror, that you are as far back as you’re ever going to go anyway.
So then you’ll try to start the engine. You’ll turn the key and nothing will happen. ‘My,’ you’ll exclaim to yourself, ‘this is quiet.’ But there’s a very good reason for this silence, which will become apparent after you’ve spent 10 minutes jiggling the gear lever into Drive and hunting down the parking brake release.
You press the throttle, which mercifully is where you expect it to be; and you’ll go nowhere. This is because you haven’t actually turned the engine on until you’ve pushed a button marked Start. This is to be found in the very last place you look.
It’s so confusing in there, and so small, that the button to engage the satellite navigation system is in the roof. Push it and the screen slides out of the dash. But all the screen gives you is a health-and-safety message about keeping your eyes on the road. You need to press a button marked Okay to absolve VW from all responsibility should you drive into a tree while inputting the address of your destination.
Actually, you are more likely to crash into a tree while looking for the button marked Okay. Go on. Guess where it is. No. No. Ha, you’re not even warm. It is, in fact, on a remote-control device in a leather pocket next to the foot-operated parking brake.
So what about life in the back of the Arnage? Well, here you get lots of room for lounging around, and lots of toys, including a DVD player and television system. This, however, is so fiddly and impossible to operate that even my eight-year-old son was stumped.
At this stage in your test drive, you’ll probably want to turn round and go back to the dealership, fairly sure that this is not the car for you. But you won’t be able to turn round because, unfortunately, the Arnage is bigger than most fields. You don’t measure it in feet so much as in acres.
I took it to watch my son play rugby at the Oxford ground last weekend and I parked in a spot reserved for the chairman. And because it was so big it spilled over and completely filled the spaces reserved for the president and secretary as well. You try turning something that enormous round in anything smaller than Heathrow. You’d struggle even if you had the whole of Canada to play with.
To make matters worse, it has a throttle pedal cunningly contrived to keep all of Bentley’s bodyshops in business for the rest of time. You press it gently, because you only want to dribble forward, and you don’t go anywhere at all. So you press it harder and you become aware that the turbocharged 6.75-litre V8 is starting to work. But you still don’t go anywhere. So you give it a big shove. And rocket forward at the speed of light into the car in front of you.
There’s a similar problem with the brake pedal. Push it gently, and your speed remains unchanged. Push it firmly, and still the speed of your three-ton automobile is unaffected. So then you stamp on it like you’re stamping on an angry scorpion, and BANG. Your nose breaks as it smashes into the steering wheel.
‘Still,’ you’re thinking, ‘all of this is a small price to pay for the privilege of being in one of the most comfortable cars that money can buy.’ You probably have visions of sinking into a duck-down seat and being floated from place to place on a suspension system made from double cream and silk.
Well, sorry, but actually the seats are not that soft, and instead of an adjustable lumbar support all you get are two buttons – where you can’t find them – that make whirring noises. But don’t in fact do anything.
Then there’s the suspension, which is actually made from the back hoe loader from an old JCB. I have driven small Fiats that are more comfortable than an Arnage. Falling over is more comfortable than an Arnage. Everything is more comfortable, come to think of it. Even being stabbed.
At this point I’d love to tell you about the fuel consumption, but the only way this can be tested is by brimming the tank, using the contents, and then brimming it again. I could not afford to fill it even once, I’m afraid. One time I put twenty quid’s worth of fuel in there but it didn’t move the needle at all.
On every rational level, then, this £160,000 car is junk. A throwback to the days when Britain was on a slippery slide to industrial death.
And yet…
If you push through the tricky town-driving characteristics, and the madness of the dashboard and the harsh ride, and you can afford the fuel needed for such things, you will find the Arnage shifts like a scalded elephant. It has much more oomph than you could reasonably expect from such a monster. And it handles like an absolute dream.
But the best thing about this car – the one thing that oozes from every weld and every handmade stitch and that overwhelms all the faults – is the unparalleled sense of occasion it affords. When you climb aboard, it’s a bit like climbing into your dinner jacket. It’s uncomfortable and stupid, but there’s a sense that you’re about to do something very special.
And for this pomp alone I would buy the Bentley Arnage like a shot. Because, with the exception of the new Rolls-Royce, which (don’t forget) is nearly twice the price and even bigger, no other car made today has ‘it’ in such sheer abundance. No other car makes you feel so damn good.
Sunday 19 December 2004
Don’t Stop Me Now