The Art Of Poise

​Between them these cars weigh a whisker under five tons, yet Bentley claims they still offer something for the driving enthusiast. Chassis boss Matthew Unsworth tells evo how this is possible.

- Richard Meaden

TO GRAB HOLD OF A Bentley Mulsanne and drive it hard across the toughest, most entertaining roads you know is to find yourself questioning whether Andrew Unsworth, Bentley’s head of chassis dynamics, has made a pact with the devil. That or he’s in possession of some long lost and unpublished works of Sir Isaac Newton. Whatever it is, Unsworth clearly holds the secret to bestowing a 2.5-ton super-luxury limousine with outrageously good handling, for much against expectations, this vast car is so entertaining you’d swear there should be a law – Newton’s or otherwise – against it.

We’re up on the evo Triangle – home of the wicked compression, inviting curve and tricky transition (sometimes simultaneously), and though it might have become something of a cliché, this three-sided test route remains one of the most complete kinematic interrogations we know. It should be tying this Mulsanne in knots and reducing its springs and dampers to jelly, but much to my amazement (this is my first time in Bentley’s lunatic limo) not only is it coping, it’s putting a huge smile on my face.

It’s easy to tar Crewe’s missiles with the Cheshire Chariot brush, but after running a Continental GT V8 S – Bentley’s most ‘evo’ series-production car – as a long-termer, and now sampling the Mulsanne, it’s clear there’s substance and subtlety to the way each Bentley model is set up. This, then, is our chance to dig a bit deeper and discover from Unsworth how each car’s dynamic fingerprint is created.

The first and most obvious question to aim at Unsworth is what makes a Bentley feel like a Bentley?