''Don’t look at the gear gate,” shouts owner Ben Eastick over the exhausts. “The pattern is normal, but the gate’s back-to-front and it’ll just confuse you.”And he’s right. The last gearchange I experienced that demanded this much concentration – and respect, for its huge, weighty stick – was in a Scammell Explorer. Even a ‘WO’ Bentley’s right-handed four-speed is more instinctive. But once you learn to trust your intuition and thrust the lever where you want it, any nervousness recedes. It doesn’t feel as if there’s much synchromesh at play, but it’s better as it warms, still preferring a deliberate double-declutch down to second… just like a Scammell (or a WO Bentley, as it happens).
Not that it matters much which ratio you select in this unique Bentley T-type Special. With a near-flat torque curve that doesn’t so much peak as flatline at 400lb ft once you’re over about 1500rpm, and only c2425lb to propel including driver and fuel (it weighs 2236lb, just over a metric tonne), it is prodigiously fast in any gear. Rolls-Royce advised that its pushrod V8 shouldn’t be revved to more than 5000rpm – though it now runs custom-made solid lifters – but the telltale sits 1000pm lower, and that’s quite enough for our small test track, especially with the 2.88:1 diff. It’s a mild balancing act to get it off the line because it doesn’t feel as if there’s much flywheel. Eastick says it’s much smoother since the blower was fitted, and here the low extra mass of its internals must help.
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A Breath of Fresh Air- Alfa Romeo's exotic, V8-powered Montreal was like nothing the marque had made before, but can it compare with a Porsche masterpiece, the 911S 2.4?
The stereotype of the ItaloGermanic automotive rivalry is that the Latin car will be brilliant to drive, but poorly built and ergonomically flawed, while the Teutonic will be the opposite. Yet these 2+2 sports coupés both ran against orthodoxy. In the Montreal, Alfa Romeo created an outlandish-looking two-door more comfortable, more powerful and more refined than anything it had produced for decades. Meanwhile, Porsche continued to refine its back-to-front, austere and increasingly aged 911. Neither took a traditional development path, but both created thrilling and individual cars that have echoed through the decades.
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