ive a car designer a pencil and scrap
of paper, stand back, and 10 min-
utes later you’ll have a sketch of an
imagined slinky-dreamy two-seater
sports car. Usually a coupe. Usually
front-engined. It’s just what they’re
genetically programmed to do, even if
they’re employed by a company that will forever
thwart their chance to realize the fantasy. And,
sure enough, the designers at Bentley Motors
are no different. Their day job has been all about
other things: big four-seat coupes, convertibles
and four-door sedans—the areas of preeminence
occupied by the company since the ’20s. Oh, and
then over the past couple of years, an SUV, which
has wracked their brains more than somewhat.
And then, at the Geneva show...this.
This is precisely the sort of car that designers
love to do. The kind of thing Bentley’s designers
have been waving under their bosses’ noses for
years. Sangyup Lee, Bentley’s head of exterior
and advanced design, tells me: “It was a skunk-
works project at first, and then we showed the
idea to management, and they approved.”
Company boss Wolfgang Dürheimer was
the one who recognized that the ballooning
global posh-SUV bandwagon was something
the Crewe factory just had to climb aboard, so,
three years ago, he pushed the Bentayga ahead
of the two-seater on Bentley’s to-do list. All
the while, he admitted that the money-making
potential of the SUV was in tension with the
heart-string tug of a sports car. Even at the
time the concept version of the Bentayga was
first shown, Dürheimer told me that a two-seat
sports car existed as a full-size design model in
the studio. Mind you, this EXP 10 Speed 6 isn’t
an evolution of that earlier model. They started
from scratch. He says the car we see today didn’t
take long because “when you give the designers a
brief like that, it’s like letting them off the leash.”
The official line is that this could be the
template for a fifth model line from Bentley.
To discern if it could pay its way in production,
Crewe people aren’t just stroking their chins and
consulting a crystal ball. The gorgeously finished
concept car is a tool for some rigorous research.
Dürheimer says: “This car will be taken to prod-
uct clinics in Europe, the US and China. We’ll do
our homework and look at the customer data.”
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