Bentley Flying Spur Speed Edition 12 Review: A Fitting W12 Farewell

2023 has felt like a year of goodbyes. The Audi R8 and TT are bowing out, Kia has binned the Stinger GT as its EV6 GT is now the performance flagship, and there’s no longer a Porsche Panamera ST, with the new version of the Panamera dispensing with a wagon. And then we have to think about Bentley.

Admittedly, the W12 engine it uses in the Continental GT and the Flying Spur will live on into 2024, but only until April. Our drive in the Flying Spur Speed Edition 12, then, is a way of saying goodbye to an engine we may not experience again in a brand-new car.

Although it’s very much a VW Group engine, the W12 has become synonymous with Bentley. Years after its sister brands ditched the unusual unit, comprised of two narrow-angle, VR6-style banks of cylinders, it remains a going concern, and these 6.0-litre, twin-turbo beasts have been assembled by hand in Crewe for the last 20 years.

Prodding the start button, which sits neatly in the middle of the rotary drive mode selector, the W12 awakes without a whole lot of fanfare, settling to a smooth, quiet idle. Once warmed up and on a suitable road, the throttle pedal can be fully pressed, at which point there’s a very brief moment of turbo lag before the Flying Spur Speed hurries towards the horizon with enthusiasm. And, it must be said, without a particularly stirring soundtrack.

It’s an odd-sounding engine which makes a noise more akin to a particularly beefy V6 than a conventional V12. As noted when we drove the Batur recently, a car which uses a more powerful version of the W12, it’s an engine we respect for its engineering (it does, after all, pack a lot of cylinders into a very compact package) rather than how it makes us feel.

The Edition 12 is a long way short of the Batur’s 740bhp output, but it does come with a little more power than the standard Speed, outputting 650bhp versus a ‘mere’ 626bhp. 0-62mph comes up in just 3.7 seconds, and the top speed is 207mph. You’d probably have to get the two together to really notice the difference - 24bhp is not exactly a huge proportional increase when you’re starting with so much power. 

While slower, the V8-powered Flying Spur S sounds better and thus is more fun, but there’s an argument that the W12 is more befitting of a Bentley. It’s so smooth and so effortless - you can get up to speed pretty quickly by simply tickling the throttle. It may not be as emotive as the V8s but in any case, it’ll be a shame when this strangest of 12-cylinder engines bows out.

As for the car it’s slotted in, the Flying Spur is as weirdly agile as it’s ever been. It’s far more willing to change direction than you’d think a car weighing nearly two and a half tonnes should be, and whenever you do start to feel the front-end heft, a more greedy application of throttle helps solve it. The Spur might be all-wheel-drive, but it’s always keen to lob oodles of torque to the rear wheels, making for plenty of mid-corner throttle adjustability. The rear-wheel steering system adds to this sense of athleticism, turning the rear wheels in the opposite direction to the front at lower speeds for faster change of direction (and a much easier time parking this 5.3-metre car) and in tandem when you’re going quicker to aid stability.

Impressive though all this is, of greater importance than how the Flying Spur feels when you’re trying to drive it like a hot hatch is when you’re gently wafting along. It’s great at that sort of thing, with a silky smooth ride from the air suspension and a sense of quiet from its well-insulated, double-glazed cabin. The only slight blot on its report card concerns its tendency to thump a little over things like potholes, which we’ll put mostly down to the 22-inch alloy wheels.

These are fitted as standard on all Edition 12s, along with the moody-looking Blackline pack. You also get Edition 12 logos, well, everywhere, including on the C-pillars and treadplates. Celebrating the W12, the engine’s firing order. There’s also a special numbered plaque topping the engine, and you even get a scale model of the block.

The price for all this is £231,200 (compared to £208,700 for a standard Speed), and that doesn’t include options or any bespoke touches from Bentley’s Mulliner division, so it shouldn’t be that hard to push the figure beyond a quarter of a million quid.

Does the Flying Spur justify that figure? It certainly has the presence of a hugely expensive luxobarge on the outside, and inside, it’s awash with lovely details like leather quilting, ‘organ stop’ vent controls and the Toblerone-shaped rotating element in the dash that can display either a set of gauges, a screen or a blank piece of veneer.

Granted, there are a few recognisable bits from elsewhere in the VW Group stable, and it doesn’t quite have the wow factor of the much newer BMW i7/7-series, but I’m not sure that’ll phase the average Bentley buyer a great deal. In its own way, the Flying Spur Speed Edition 12 is thoroughly lovely and extremely special. 

As a send-off, it fits the bill perfectly.