The official line on the Bentley EXP 10 Speed 6 is that it’s nothing more than a toe-in-the-water concept, a corporate tease to see if enough people scream “yes” to the idea of a smaller Bentley sports car, and wave their wallets with equal enthusiasm, to make it worth doing.
We suspect it’s considerably more than that, having both seen how detailed the concept is—with some parts looking like they’re already in production—and also having spoken to Bentley design boss Luc Donckerwolke on the stand in Geneva. Although he did nothing to contradict the official line, he certainly made clear that a production version of the Speed Six is eminently feasible, and he clearly thinks highly desirable.
Donckerwolke says that work on the Speed 6 started two and a half years ago, and came as the result of an off-the-books project by Bentley’s design team to try and imagine a completely new model line. “Evolution of existing models always binds you,” Donckerwolke said, so “we started doing different cars, five different proposals of cars that were not being considered as future models for Bentley at the time. One of them was a two-seater sports car, pushing the performance aspect of the brand, but keeping it luxurious as a Bentley should be. When we presented the cars, it was the one that was picked.
The Speed 6 has been developed alongside Bentley’s other forthcoming models, with a shared design team and lots of styling details that we can confidently predict to see elsewhere in the range before long—the elongated headlights in particular.
But Donckerwolke was also very keen to say that pretty much every part of the Speed 6 concept is production-viable, and has obviously been carefully considered from that point of view.
“I don’t like the show-business approach to motor shows,” he said, “bluffing people and then stepping back and doing something that is less appealing. We had a lot of time for this project to mature . . . obviously, there are a lot of things that would have to be tuned—pedestrian protection, impact beams, clearance for the windscreen wipers, rearview mirror size. But there are no major architectural problems in delivering a car just like that, we took care of that. Yes, we’d provide a bigger boot opening, a different bonnet size. But it’s tuning. There’s nothing to stop the show.”
