A basket case in British hands, Bentley is now repaying VW's patience and purse with burgeoning sales figures. The Flying Spur, says John Griffiths, shows what Bentley has achieved
Bentley is calling it the Flying Spur. But the first all-new four-door saloon to be built by the famous old British luxury carmaker under Volkswagen's now seven-year-old ownership might more appropriately have been called the Flying Start.
"If you had asked me at Christmas 2003 where we would be at the end of 2004, I would have said that if we could reach 70 per cent of our goal, that would be good," says Franz-Josef Paefgen, former head of VW's Audi division who has been Bentley's chairman since March 2002.
"Instead," says the normally austere 58-year-old Austrian with a broad grin, "we've got 100 per cent." Paefgen is speaking at the launch of the £115,000 Flying Spur in Venice's grand old Gritti Palace hotel. It seems a perverse choice of setting. Bentley may once have been sinking, like Italy's beautiful old lagoon city, in the run-up to the 1998 sale of Bentley and Rolls-Royce by the cash-strapped British Vickers group - Bentley to VW and Rolls to rival BMW.
But now the "Flying" tag, used occasionally on its cars since Bentley was founded in 1919, far more accurately reflects not only the new model but the state of the company. Bentley is running far in advance of its sales targets and has set its sights on altering the face of the world's luxury car market.
In 1997, the last year of Vickers ownership, barely 1,000 Bentleys trickled out of showrooms. Prior to picking up the keys to the then-ramshackle Crewe factory, VW declared that money would be poured in by the bucketload and Bentley made great once more. Some 2,500 disgruntled and disillusioned workers muttered "pull the other one" under their collective breath and waited for the cock-ups.
After more than £1bn of investment and an ambitious new model programme, the cock-ups have been notable by their absence. Bentley has secured its first victory in the Le Mans 24 Hours race for 70 years and this year it will make, and most certainly sell, some 8,000 cars - a peak never remotely reached before in Bentley's history.
How appropriate, then, that the world's press has been invited to pilot the Flying Spur in the Dolomites, soaring above Venice.
By common consent, the planet's fastest-ever four-door saloon has captured the essence of Bentley's heritage - with its graceful silhouette and tasteful wood and leather interior - while also being an absolute stormer.
There is high-tech luxury aplenty. But unleash the beast and its missing sound is that of silence from exhausts the size of drainpipes. At more than 2.5 tonnes, it's as heavy as two of its humble VW Golf siblings. But it is also possessed of 550 rumbling, grumbling horsepower.
Excused the 155mph limiter the German motor industry imposes on most of its products, the Bentley will reach 195mph in the hands of any driver daft enough to let it - at least on a public highway.
What such enormous performance translates into during real-life driving is the ability, aided by 4-wheel drive, to surge effortlessly and instantly between corners at a speed mind-numbing to most other road users, and to make autobahn cruising relaxed even at a pace close to most rivals' speed limiters. Except that, in the world according to Paefgen, neither the Flying Spur nor the earlier-launched Continental GT have much in the way of rivals. There is considerably more to his view than the obvious prejudice of the man in charge of the toy shop.
If you suggest he has based Bentley's entire strategy on pyramid selling, Paefgen will neither thump you nor call in the libel lawyers. In fact, he will look pleased. For Paefgen's own pyramid has nothing to do with dodgy dealing and everything to do with explaining a vast and mysterious "black hole" he has found in the car market universe - a hole into which he is piloting Bentley enthusiastically at something close to warp speed.
His pyramid has three levels. The tip is made up of cars costing $200,000 or more. Over the years, it has changed in size hardly at all, attracting around 3,000 well-heeled buyers annually. The base is made up of cars costing between $90,000 and $150,000: top-specification Mercedes, Porsches, BMWs and the like. It's more than 30 times bigger than the tip, each year attracting around 100,000 buyers.
Paefgen's black hole lies in the middle layer, for cars costing between $150,000 and $200,000.
You might expect, splitting the difference, a market of around 50,000, embracing both luxury cars and high-performance exotica. But right up until two years ago it averaged only 3,400 buyers, just a few hundred more than the $200,000-plus tip, and was occupied almost exclusively by Ferrari and Aston Martin. Last year, in its first full year of sales, the Continental GT tripled the market on its own.
As more rivals wake up to the opportunity, it can be expected to grow even faster. Within three years, the segment will have attracted 15,000 buyers, Paefgen believes. His prediction that more rivals will soon be coming along for the ride is already starting to come true - not least at old stablemate Rolls-Royce.
Currently Rolls can be seen only in the luxury market stratosphere with its £220,000 Phantom limousine, soon to be joined by an even more expensive convertible.
But Ian Robertson, its amiable chairman, expects that within a year decisions will have been made taking Rolls into other sectors - and almost certainly into those uncharted regions identified by Bentley. "We're ruling nothing in and nothing out," says Robertson, pointing out that over its century-long history Rolls has made almost everything from two-door convertibles to its own inimitable version of the SUV, an off-roader for tiger-shootin' maharajahs.
Aston Martin, too, is on a roll. With its latest DB9 selling well and its entry-level V8 due soon, the famous luxury sports carmaker, which was broke when bought by Ford in the 1980s, is heading towards matching Bentley's levels of production.
Paefgen claims the prospect of more competition doesn't unnerve him one bit. By his calculations, more than one in three of those 100,000 who spend up to $150,000 on a car could fairly easily be persuaded to cough up the extra thousands to join the Bentley boys or newer rivals. Even at 30,000 units, the black hole would still be far from crowded. ... - Financial Times Service