Price:
£130 500 (R1 835 000).
Performance:
312km/h, 0-100km/h 4.8sec.
General fuel consumption:
17.2 litres/100km.
I am wafting serenely along a freeway at dusk when I spot a gritting truck (it's still winter up north) ahead spewing salty gravel at high velocity across all three lanes and I start to panic. What havoc will those thousands of sharp brown shards wreak upon the immaculate sky-blue paintwork of the new Bentley GTC I am driving?
Being a man, I must turn the stereo off to weigh up my options (I also do this also when approaching motorway tolls and car-park barriers because music confuses me).
I decide to slow to 80km/h and hang back as the rest of the world passes by wondering who the doddering old mouth-breather in the Footballers' Wives' car is.
Eventually the gritter pulls off and I bury the accelerator in the deep, dark-blue wool carpet. The Bentley hunkers down on its rear garden rollers, pauses for an instant, then lifts up like a hovercraft and hurtles forward, its six-litre W12 rumbling like distant timpani.
The snow has melted by the following afternoon and turned the world brown. I pick up my children from a playdate. Their feet appear to have been replaced by pig's trotters. I shudder to think what a mess they might make of the Bentley's virginal cream leather.
Do I remove their shoes before they clamber into the rear seats and risk frozen toes or leave them on and spend the rest of the afternoon on my knees with a warm sponge? (I'll leave you to hazard a guess).
Life with a beautiful, expensive new car will turn even the most carefree soul into a quivering neurotic. I was one anyway but if I get a grip and can cast off my hulking rucksack of guilt at belching out 410g/km of CO2 into the face of my fellow man I must concede that the Bentley is one hell of a car.
Its performance is staggering by any benchmark; for something that weighs more than Arc de Triomf it is truly fearful. And this is no high-seas gin palace: the GTC holds its composure when you turn the steering wheel and has the largest brake discs yet fitted to a production car - as well as quite possibly the fattest key.
Inside, the quality of craftsmanship surpasses perhaps even that of the Rolls Royce I tried the same week.
The GTC is more graceful than its bulky bottomed, coupé sibling - and I love the fact that Bentley's engineers have intentionally slowed the electric roof mechanism to 25 seconds instead of 20 because it was "deemed more seemly".
What a wait list
Apparently you can drive it with the roof down at 280km/h without any buffeting although at top speed the wind might rip off your arm should you make any hand signals.
Tragically, as I write this, there are almost 1500 people ahead of me on the waiting list for a GTC. And that's only in the UK. So, despite Bentley production running at a record high of 10 000 units per year, there's a delivery time of almost 18 months.
The money isn't a problem, of course (my Macau-based kidney broker has assured me top dollar if I can persuade my wife to fly there for the operation) but I'm afraid I simply don't have the patience.
I have a plan, though. By the time you read this I will have barricaded myself in my garage with the media car and a rivet gun, having amassed enough supplies of tinned food, toilet paper and Cadbury's Double Deckers to last three months by which time I'm sure they will have forgotten all about it. - The Independent, London