At first glance, it's hard to tell how big the Bentley Brooklands really is. It looms into view, like a battleship steaming over the horizon and just keeps on looming the closer you get. It's not until you're standing right next to the Brooklands you realize, with a shock, that the damn thing is rolling on 20-inch wheels. They look like 18s.
The Brooklands is a coupe of titanic proportions: a 213-inch two-door that's almost as long as a Lincoln Town Car, and, at 5853 pounds, weighs about as much as a Chevy Suburban. It has an engine that could power the Titanic, too. The ageless 6.75-liter V-8 under the hood (its basic architecture dates back almost half a century) develops 530 horsepower and an axle-twisting 774 lb-ft of torque at 3250 rpm. It's the most powerful V-8 ever from Crewe, and the world's torquiest automotive engine.
Bentleys have always been big, heavy, and fast -- Ettore Bugatti once sneeringly dubbed the Le Mans-winning Bentleys of the late 1920s "the fastest trucks in Europe." The Brooklands is big, it's heavy, and it sure is fast. But it doesn't feel like a truck.
It may not have a surfeit of valves, there's nary an overhead cam in sight, and the redline is a Peterbilt-like 4600 rpm, but the 6.75-liter V-8 under the hood, which traces its origins to a 1950s Packard design, is stunningly effective. Nail the gas and this gargantuan coupe launches like a Saturn V, gentle at first as the engine overcomes inertia, then, at about 2500 rpm, it's like someone lit an afterburner as the twin turbos start pumping max boost.
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