Rallying a Bentley Continental GT, Top Gear Style.

After a longer than usual break from our screens, the new series of BBC's Top Gear started on Sunday evening. Personally, I've felt the show might be starting to loose it's 'edge', many of the segments have felt far to contrived, and the 2011/12 Indian Christmas special, was quite frankly awful.

The series seems to have got off to a hopeful start, the Hamster tested the new Pagani Huayra, which the Stig took around the Top Gear test track in record time. Clarkson tried to build a Peel P50 beating micro car (slightly annoying) and the segment I've been waiting for since the Wales Rally GB last autumn, James May taking the Bentley Continental GT Speed out for a spin on a WRC Rally stage.

I'd been to the Sweet Lamb stage of the Rally last year (2012), so had seen James May filming with the Bentley on the stage, for what I assumed would be a segment for Top Gear. I'd been looking forward to seeing the result of the days rallying! The runs took place in the gap between the two runnings of the special stage, there were some rumours in the crowd that James May was going to be filming. After a while, a silver Bentley slowly drove onto the left hand side of the stage, I'd never seen so many GoPro's! the car was covered in them. Kris Meeke drove slowly (ish) to the final hairpin of the decent into the Sweet Lamb 'bowl', there it turned and hurtled down the hill, over the cattle grid and through the first of Sweet Lamb's watersplashes.



Hitting the watersplash

The Bentley practically emptied the all water from the watersplash, it was like a tidal wave. From the watersplash, they hit a small jump and considering the weight of the car, got all four wheels off the ground! The car then went out of sight as it slid around the small complex at the centre of the Sweet Lamb complex, then through the second watersplash (river ford) and up the hill which exists the complex. There they stopped and after a short break, turned the car and drove back through for another run. They did several runs through of the stage, some with the GoPro's attached and a couple of runs without them. Each run through Kris seemed to push harder, on a couple of occasions coming close to pushing to hard, at one point damaging the bottom lip of the front bumper. This isn't to diminish his skill behind the wheel, considering he was running on road tyres!

 

 

To see some more photographs of the Bentley, plus photo's of the Rally as a whole have a look at my flickr site.