Yahoo Autos Finding the Ultimate 'Donut' in a W-12 Bentley Continental GT
The Bentley Continental GT Convertible's 12 cylinders thump away, hungry for cool morning air. For now, they’re idling, restrained, anticipating. It’s 5:59 a.m., and Rosauers grocery in Colfax, Washington, opens in precisely one minute. Inside, some of the finest maple bars in the known cosmos are being pulled from a pastry oven.
This story originally appeared in the September/October 2020 issue of Road & Track.
What’s a maple bar? Technically, an oblong yeasted fritter, fried and topped with maple glaze. Unofficially, The Donut of the West, the most popular breakfast confection on the fairer side of the Rockies. The good ones taste great. The great ones are sickly-sweet orgasm. How they came to flourish by the Pacific, we’ll never know; Vermont and Quebec produce the bulk of our continent’s maple syrup. One baker told me Washington State’s school children were served a maple bar and a cup of chili for breakfast during postwar recovery. Odds are, you’ve never experienced a maple bar. They’re a regional delicacy, and every local has their favorite. Ask a dozen Washingtonians where the best bars are born and get 20 different answers. Less divisive subjects, such as politics, religion, and whether Kim Jong Un could out-duel Betty White in a knife fight, are safer dinner-table subjects out here.
But that’s how we got here. Rosauers parking lot, 6:03 a.m., a box of oven-fresh maple bars perched in the backseat of a Bentley. My father-in-law, an otherwise reasonable man who lends me tools far too often, has squawked about these Rosauers bars for years. My college roommate, a mostly unreasonable man who never lends me tools, favors Retro Donuts in Spokane. My pick: Madison Park Bakery in Seattle. Over mezcal margaritas one night, a showdown took shape.
I’d corral a box of bars from each contender, with a blind taste test to follow. The donuts would have to be baked and eaten the same day, as day-old maple glaze devolves to slime underneath a hardened crust. The three donut shops are separated by 359 miles of flowing local highway and sprints of interstate. I’d begin in Colfax, go to Spokane, then Seattle, and end up near where I started. Six hundred fifty miles total. Eleven-ish hours of frivolous driving. For donuts.
And what is a Bentley if not frivolous? The thing costs $302,000. Its trunk barely fits a pair of folding lawn chairs. Its rear seats hate human legs. In fact, those seats barely hold a cooler, a gallon of water, and requisite road trip ephemera (coffee mugs, jerky bags, empty packets of Arby’s sauce). The Continental GT is aimed squarely at the ease and pleasure of its driver and one passenger. Nothing else. Perfect.
You’re coddled from the moment you slump into the Continental’s leather. A willowy robot arm proffers your seatbelt (it’s positively vulgar to twist one’s torso and reach, Bentley asserts). The seat slides backward to allow your entry, then hums you toward the steering wheel.
A platter of buttons splays across the center console. Every creature comfort: heated wheel; heated air scarf; heated and cooled massaging seats with twenty-some odd settings to adjust position and intensity. Now, if we’re splitting six-figure hairs, a Mercedes S-class cabrio offers the same amenities at a lower price and gives a firmer massage.
But no S-class provides this Bentley’s pageantry. We chose the W-12 engine over the standard twin-turbo V-8, and the drop-top roof over the coupe, a sense of occasion over the merely sumptuous.
The cabin is swathed in plush leather; the infotainment screen rotates to reveal either a trio of analog gauges or a split of piano-like lacquer and elegantly figured wood, according to your mood. It’s magnificent. If you can’t find bliss in this cabin, your greasy little soul is incapable of enlightenment.
As our greasy little souls are incapable of affording this Bentley, we sought our enlightenment in maple bars. My wife and I nosed the Bentley out of Rosauers’s lot and onto Highway 195, north to Spokane, Retro Donuts about 100 miles away. Everything from tractor-trailers to actual tractors clogs this lazy, smooth two-lane for the first few miles, but the road soon becomes flowing and trafficless, and you learn that much of this Bentley’s comfort stems from its quietude.
With the roof up at 55 mph, the Continental GT Convertible’s interior is quiet enough to hear your own heartbeat. Sample any other convertible and you’ll understand why that’s impressive (my Miata, which is not familiar with the concept of luxury, sounds like a pissed grizzly tearing the ears off my skull). Double panes of thick glass cut wind noise trailing from the A-pillar. The rest of the cabin must be neutron-star dense with sound deadening. At one point, I caromed the Bentley down a gravel road for photos among Eastern Washington’s seas of rolling wheat, barley, and canola. It was the single most civilized trip down rutted gravel ever taken. Pioneering stuff. I can’t remember hearing a single stone in the Bentley’s wheel wells.
The Continental GT loafed into Retro’s parking lot about an hour after leaving Rosauers. I chatted with their baker, who had a box waiting behind the counter. He spoke of the donut’s vaunted place in the pantheon of Americana. He spoke of the Donut Dollies, selfless Red Cross volunteers who delivered a taste of home to soldiers abroad. On how the donut, inherently decadent, is also wholesome fuel for working-class Americans from beat cops to Homer Simpson.
I nodded at this wisdom, not mentioning the Bentley idling in the parking lot.
Next up, Spokane to Seattle, a 280-mile slice of interstate, true Continental Grand Touring territory. It’s immoral to drive this 207-mph convertible at the speed limit. The Bentley’s bubble of monastic contentment on a 55-mph two-lane is one thing. But the Continental GT Convertible felt rapturous going flat out on an arrow-straight superhighway.
There the engine’s character finally sparked to life. Wonderful, because Bentley’s 6.0-liter W-12 is a bit of an oddball. At one end, it nods to Britain’s early W-12 aviation engines. At the other, it’s a thoroughly modern power unit developed and leveraged by the Volkswagen Group lineup’s upper crust. This W-12 doesn’t deliver the sonorous, silky power of a V-12 or the fire and brimstone of something like AMG’s twin-turbo V-8.
But it does have character. Barks and burps and burbles erupt from the Continental’s exhaust at low revs. Think a marine V-8, but snarlier. That throaty growl turns to cello-string hum as revs build. The engine wrings out 664 lb-ft from 1350-4500 rpm, then pushes on to a 6000-rpm, 626-hp crescendo. This W-12 seems to revel in its glut of midrange torque, happiest when chasing the horizon at high speed and low revolutions.
As we met the Snoqualmie mountain pass dividing Washington, the Bentley’s 8-speed dual-clutch seamlessly dropped a few gears to keep the W-12 thrumming in the thick of its torque. At the base of the pass, the interstate unraveled into four lanes. Traffic slowed under the uphill strain. But the Bentley grew wings.
Under full throttle, on any given passing maneuver, the Continental hits triple-digit speeds in an instant. You’ll barely notice as you swing around a truck while cresting 140 mph. The usual “built for the Autobahn” clichés apply here; this Bentley shares a platform with the Porsche Panamera. But instead of the weighty/bumpy/heavy-so-you-know-you’re-cookin’ handling of German cruisers, the Bentley simply goes creamy all over.
We hit Seattle four hours after leaving Spokane. The pit stop at Madison Park Bakery took just minutes, but brought back years of memories. I ate dozens of these maple bars before moving to Michigan to start my journey at R&T.
I took a moment before hitting the road to stretch and daub a glob of maple frosting off the Bentley’s blue top. That roof is another marvel, as isolating as any convertible roof could hope to be. It folds up or down in seconds, quick enough that any cloud break is worth hiding the drop top. Both pairs of side windows roll down into the Bentley’s body, too, leaving the Continental at its most essential.
Top down, the Bentley looks boatlike from the rear, evoking Riva yachts and tailored linen pants. The Continental GT’s front is broader, less elegant. Its woven grille lends a sort of wide-shouldered-chainmail chic. But this third-generation Continental GT is still a refinement of the previous generation’s design, somewhat catlike, certainly slinkier than before. Especially with the top down. Wind buffeting is nearly absent while cruising al fresco. Bentley’s engineers must’ve slept in Crewe’s wind tunnel while they sculpted the GT Convertible’s curves.
The final leg to our Pullman home doubled back on I-90. We stopped for gas somewhere outside the city, and it occurred to me that nearly 400 miles had gone by in a blink. Fuel economy seems scarcely worth mentioning in a vehicle that costs the same as a suburban house. But this 12-cylinder, 600-horse lump managed almost 24 mpg. The Bentley’s 20-gallon tank will let you drive across Oregon nonstop.
We approached home top-down. I took a short detour on good, familiar roads, flicking the Bentley into a sequence of corners, thumbing the chassis to Sport mode on the console’s selector wheel. Predictably, the dampers firmed up, the exhaust grumbled a bit more. The ride got worse. Ruts and bumps poked at my spine for the first time. Before I’d exited the third corner, I thought, “well that’s rather unpleasant,” and switched it back to the car’s default “B” mode. That mode coddles you, but allows for fun while bending that 5322-pound curb weight into each corner, managing body roll, the car squatting as you lean into the throttle on corner exit.
The Continental felt flummoxed only when I asked it to behave as a sports car. Slamming the gas pedal down from a stop produced a bucking gear change from first to second. There’s a whiff of lag down low where torque fights curb weight. Body motion on that soft suspension is hard for the chassis to control. The car feels happiest under measured, graceful inputs, and dislikes hurried motions. So you keep the Bentley at a steady gallop, avoiding the wallow at low speeds in tight corners, soaking in suspension compliance that smooths highway potholes into plate glass. True Grand Touring stuff.
We made it home in good time just the same. Including a lunch stop, the trip took less than 11 hours.
Backing into the driveway emphasized a final complaint: The Continental GT Convertible is hard to park. The Bentley’s body is broad and squat with rounded edges and a high, visibility-hampering beltline. Strangely, the Bentley’s backup and overhead cameras are deeply mediocre, a gut punch on such an expensive vehicle. The Clooney set will no doubt dent many a fender on the Bartolini sculptures lining their Lago di Como villas.
But finally, the car was parked and beautiful. We set up our blind maple bar taste test on a plebian picnic table in the driveway. My father-in-law and old roommate sat down, looking as if their lives were on the line. But with each bite, we ascended closer to maple-glazed heaven.
Tasting notes: Madison Park Bakery’s frosting is thick, luscious, almost boozy with vanilla extract, blanketing a buttery soft fritter. Retro bakes a heartier, chewier, more satisfying dough, and their frosting pops with a sugary brightness. Rosauers’s maple bar is the sweetest and airiest of the bunch, topped with a punchier, more overtly sweet glaze. Each bite begged for another, no matter which bar.
Stomachs settled; votes were cast. I’ll die with allegiance to Madison Park Bakery, but Maple Bar Thunderdome has spoken. Retro Donuts was crowned champion. For such a hotly contested topic, nobody seemed upset. We chatted away in lawn chairs, reveling in each others’ company, riding the sugar high as the Bentley’s chameleon paint flickered with shades of champagne and lavender under the setting sun.
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