Bentley Brooklands

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.

The relentless thrust is interrupted only as the big V-8 kisses the redline in rapid succession while it works its way through the six-speed auto, the muted thunder of the 6.75 liters up front pounding like a distant artillery barrage punctuated by whooshes and whistles from the wastegates. Bentley claims the Brooklands zooms to 60 mph in 5.0 seconds and hits the 100-mph mark just 6.7 seconds later. On the tight Tuscan back roads here in Italy, where even the shortest straight sees 70 mph, the big coupe feels every bit that fast. Claimed top speed is 184 mph, stupendous for a car that looks like an apartment block next to a 911.

The Bentley engineering team lead by Ulrich Eichhorn has built on the powertrain improvements -- refined valvetrain, reprofiled camshafts, low-inertia turbochargers, and six speed automatic transmission -- introduced with the 2007 model year Arnage sedan and Azure convertible. The extra power and torque available in the Brooklands comes courtesy of a new, free-flowing intake system, a sports exhaust that boasts a 17-percent reduction in back pressure, and recalibrated valve timing and engine management system.

Despite its old-school cam-in-block and two-valves-per-cylinder layout, the Bentley V-8 is a case study in the benefits of applied technology -- launched in the 1959 Bentley S2 with a capacity of 6.23 liters, the engine has seen power and torque increase by 150 percent over the years, while fuel consumption has been cut by 60 percent, and emissions reduced by 99 percent.