What would my childhood self have made of a spacious four-door car whose speedometer is calibrated to 200mph or more? Frankly, to any child in the late 1950s, a Martian rocket landing in the High Street would have seemed more likely. But the Continental Flying Spur has been with us since 2005, its 560PS 12-cylinder engine capable of performance that would have been exceptional for a Grand Prix car not too many decades ago. No wonder that Bentley’s CEO, Dr Franz-Josef Paefgen, adapted the words of W.O. Bentley when unveiling the Continental Flying Spur at Geneva. It was not simply ‘a good car, a fast car, the best in its class’, he claimed: the Continental Flying Spur was in a class of its own.

什么能做成我的孩童时代那种速度能调整到200迈或更高速度的四门汽车？坦白的说，对于二十世纪50年代晚期的任何一个孩子来说，火星火箭的登陆看似可能性更大些。但是自2005年起，宾利汽车560每秒，12缸发动动力，使得国际汽车大奖赛几十年起就没有例外了。没有人能确切体会Bentley公司的CEO，弗兰兹-约瑟夫-柏富根博士在日内瓦举行的宾利新品发布会上言辞的含义：它不仅仅简单的是“一辆好车，一辆快车，在它的等级中是最好”，他声称，宾利汽车本身就是一个等级。