Bentley Continental Flying Spur 6.0 W12
Project Bentley Continental
PART ONE: We find out whether it’s second time lucky as we experience project ‘drift’ with our plans to experience life with a cheap Bentley Continental.
Buy cheap, buy twice goes the saying and nowhere is it more appropriate than our experience acquiring a Bentley Continental GT 6.0-litre W12.
Backed with a confidence which comes from gambling company money rather than personal cash, we set out on a mission to discover whether a Continental from the bottom of the market can be a worthwhile project or an expensive disaster and it’s fair to say we’ve learned a lot on the way.
After trawling the bargain end of the Continental market, you’ll find there’s always someone who brightly offers a comment along the lines of “You paid how much?” before commenting how they could have found you one so much cheaper than that, but in reality, it’s not that straightforward.
At the sub-£20k mark, there’s actually not a lot of choice once you’ve weeded out the Category N cars and the badly modified examples with aftermarket Speed model bits glued to the bodywork, black-painted wheels and dubious vinyl wraps hiding who knows what.
Yes, you can find a Continental GT in an auction for as little as £8000 but unless you have a lot of spare time and your own workshop facilities – crucially, with a two-post lift – then you’re wise to avoid them. These cars can be hiding some horrifically expensive problems and they’re usually the reason why they’ve been entered into a trade sale.
Similarly, private buyers can also be concealing potentially costly problems although clearly there will also be many well-loved examples out there being moved on for genuine reasons. In fact, one of the biggest issues with these cars is lack of use, which can cause far more issues than high mileages and so many cars offered privately will boast of their low mileage – which isn’t always the selling point it might seem.
In the trade purchase
It was for those reasons that we decided to break with tradition and acquire a car from a retail trader, both for the benefits of the consumer protection it offers and for the very simple reason that most traders don’t want to see their cars coming back – and so will have prepared them to at least a basic standard.
And so it was after weeding out those write-offs and modified cars, we narrowed it down to just two cars, one of which was a promising-looking GT at a trader in the South West. Showing just over 120,000 miles it was a 2005 car and came with the benefit of the Mulliner
Driving Specification which adds the more modern-looking diamond quilted leather and aluminium trim.
After test driving the GT, it seemed ideal for our purposes with the bonus of a few jobs whic
