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Story

When Bentley Learned to Drift

Bentley doesn’t usually do sideways. It does stately, it does fast, and it does opulence at 190 mph with the air of a private club on wheels. But every now and then, even Bentley decides to kick the doors open, light the tires, and remind the world that beneath the walnut veneer lies something a little more feral.

Enter Supersports: FULL SEND—a film that feels less like a marketing exercise and more like a controlled detonation inside Crewe’s famously orderly universe.

The premise sounds like a fever dream cooked up after hours: take a Bentley Continental Supersports, hand it to rally lunatic and professional gravity denier Travis Pastrana, shut down the entire factory, and let physics take a back seat. The internal codename? “Pymkhana”—a cheeky nod to gymkhana, but rooted firmly on Pyms Lane, Bentley’s spiritual home.

What makes FULL SEND more than just tire smoke and drone shots is the absurd level of commitment behind it. Bentley didn’t just tweak a showroom car and call it a day. Engineers went full mad scientist. The electronic limited-slip differential was recalibrated for aggressive early lockup. Stability control? Permanently disabled. Software was rewritten to allow both static and rolling burnouts—because apparently one kind of tire annihilation wasn’t enough.

And then there’s the pièce de résistance: a hydraulic handbrake, grafted into the car’s control system and synchronized with its eight-speed dual-clutch gearbox. In a brand better known for whisper-quiet wafting, this is like discovering your tailor moonlights as a drift coach. The goal wasn’t just power-oversteer—it was precision chaos, enabling the Supersports to pivot and slide through Bentley’s narrow factory roads like it had something to prove.

According to engineering manager Alistair Corner, the mission was simple: take the already formidable Supersports and “turn it up to 11.” Translation—strip away the digital safety net, add just enough mechanical mischief, and see what happens when a luxury GT forgets its manners. The result is less a modified Bentley and more an unfiltered expression of what the platform can do when unleashed.

Of course, Bentley being Bentley, it prepared not one but two cars—because even in the middle of a tire-smoking circus, contingency planning matters. Both were wrapped in a custom livery by Deathspray and fitted with bespoke 22-inch wheels. The hero car even wore titanium skid blocks underneath, engineered specifically to throw sparks like a Fourth of July finale.

Filming took place over three days in September 2025, and it wasn’t as simple as pointing cameras and letting Pastrana run wild. This is still a functioning factory, with gas lines, fiber optics, and power infrastructure lurking just inches beneath the asphalt. Every stunt was meticulously choreographed. Every corner, mapped. Every risk, accounted for.

And then there was the crew—over 100 strong. Camera operators, drone pilots, safety teams, vehicle specialists, medics, fire crews, and even a camera car built from a first-generation Bentayga W12 outfitted with a crane arm. It’s the kind of production scale you’d expect from a Hollywood action film, not a car company’s in-house project.

Yet somehow, against all odds and common sense, it worked. Over three days of filming, with speeds cresting 120 mph and a luxury coupe behaving like a rally car on espresso, the total damage tally amounted to a single broken wing mirror. That’s not just luck—that’s execution.

The final product, released after three months of editing under director Jon Richards, is packed with detail, including a dozen hidden “Easter Eggs” for sharp-eyed viewers. But the real takeaway isn’t in the background cameos or the cinematic polish. It’s in the attitude shift.

FULL SEND shows a side of Bentley we don’t often see—one that trades restraint for recklessness, at least temporarily. It’s a reminder that performance and luxury aren’t mutually exclusive, and that even the most buttoned-up brands can, under the right circumstances, go completely off the rails.

And honestly? They should do it more often.

Source: Bentley

Story

The Miura Revolution: How Lamborghini Created the Modern Supercar

On March 10, 1966, at the Geneva Motor Show, Automobili Lamborghini didn’t just unveil a new car—it detonated a bomb under the entire high-performance car establishment. The machine responsible was the Lamborghini Miura, a low, impossibly sleek coupe that rewrote the rulebook on what a roadgoing performance car could be.

Before the Miura arrived, fast Italian exotics were typically front-engined grand tourers—beautiful, quick, and comfortable enough to cross continents. Lamborghini’s creation flipped that idea on its head. Its 3.9-liter V-12 sat sideways behind the driver, a layout borrowed straight from racing prototypes. The result was a road car that looked, sounded, and drove like nothing the world had seen before.

In hindsight, it’s obvious what happened next: the modern supercar was born.

A Radical Idea from a Young Company

When the Miura debuted, Lamborghini was barely out of startup mode. The company had been founded only three years earlier by Ferruccio Lamborghini, an industrialist who believed sports cars could be both brutally fast and properly engineered.

The company’s first production model, the Lamborghini 350 GT, proved Lamborghini had the technical chops to compete with established Italian marques. But a small group of young engineers inside the company wanted to go much further.

Leading that charge were Gian Paolo Dallara and Paolo Stanzani, joined by development driver Bob Wallace. Their idea was simple but outrageous for a road car: build a mid-engine V-12 sports car inspired by racing machinery.

The centerpiece was a 3.9-liter V-12 derived from a design by Giotto Bizzarrini. Mounted transversely behind the cabin, the engine sat in a shared housing with the transmission and differential—an ambitious packaging solution that saved space and created the Miura’s compact proportions.

Ferruccio Lamborghini immediately recognized the potential. The experimental chassis became Project L105.

The Chassis That Stole the Show

In November 1965, Lamborghini arrived at the Turin Motor Show with something unusual: not a finished car, but a bare chassis.

Painted satin black and sitting next to the production 350 GT, the skeletal frame drew crowds like a magnet. The steel structure weighed only about 120 kilograms, and its transversely mounted V-12—with four white exhaust pipes jutting from the rear—looked like pure mechanical sculpture.

It was the most exciting unfinished car anyone had ever seen.

Several Italian coachbuilders offered to design the body. The winning pitch allegedly came from Nuccio Bertone, who reportedly told Lamborghini his studio would create “the perfect shoe for this wonderful foot.”

Whether or not the story is true, the result certainly was.

Bertone’s Masterpiece

At Carrozzeria Bertone, a young designer named Marcello Gandini took the raw engineering concept and turned it into automotive art.

The Miura’s body was impossibly low—just over a meter tall—and impossibly wide. It looked less like a traditional car and more like a predatory animal crouched on the pavement. Pop-up headlights framed by distinctive “eyelashes,” sweeping fenders, and dramatic air intakes gave the car a face that still feels futuristic nearly six decades later.

Just weeks after Gandini finalized the design, Bertone built the prototype with a team of about 30 workers.

Then it was time for Geneva.

The Moment Everything Changed

When the finished Miura appeared on Bertone’s stand at the 1966 Geneva show, it instantly became the star of the event. Bright orange, impossibly low, and mechanically radical, it ignored every convention of the grand-touring world.

But the Miura wasn’t just about looks. Its mid-engine layout fundamentally transformed weight distribution and handling, creating a driving experience that felt closer to a racing car than any production road vehicle before it.

The name itself carried symbolism. Lamborghini had begun associating its cars with fighting bulls, and the Miura was named after a legendary Spanish breed bred by Eduardo Miura Fernández. The tradition would continue with cars like the Lamborghini Espada, Lamborghini Islero, and decades later the Lamborghini Murciélago.

The Sound of Twelve Cylinders

The Miura’s V-12 became one of the most famous engines in automotive history.

Early versions produced around 350 horsepower, already enough to make the car one of the fastest production vehicles in the world. Later iterations pushed output even higher. The ultimate version, the Miura SV, delivered roughly 385 horsepower and could exceed 290 km/h—around 180 mph.

In the late 1960s, those numbers bordered on science fiction.

The engine’s soundtrack was equally legendary. It became immortalized in cinema during the opening scene of the 1969 film The Italian Job, where a Miura snakes through Alpine roads accompanied by the howl of its V-12.

Few cars have ever sounded—or looked—so dramatic.

Three Versions of a Legend

Between 1966 and 1973, Lamborghini built just 763 Miuras, each assembled at the company’s factory in Sant’Agata Bolognese.

The original Miura P400 delivered about 350 horsepower and could reach nearly 280 km/h. It was raw, uncompromising, and today incredibly rare.

The Miura P400 S, introduced in 1968, added refinements like electric windows, upgraded interiors, and improved suspension tuning while raising output to around 370 horsepower.

Finally, the Miura P400 SV arrived in 1971 with wider rear track, improved lubrication systems, and nearly 385 horsepower—making it the fastest and most developed version of the breed.

There were also fascinating one-offs, including the dramatic 1968 Miura Roadster and a later concept revealed in 2006 at the Geneva Motor Show as a tribute to the original design.

A Machine That Demands Respect

Driving a Miura today is a reminder of how analog performance once was.

There’s no power steering, no traction control, no electronic safety net. Just mechanical feedback, a heavy clutch, and a V-12 inches behind your ears.

The reward is pure, unfiltered connection—something modern supercars struggle to replicate despite their massive performance advantages.

The Legacy of the First Supercar

The Miura didn’t just make Lamborghini famous. It created a blueprint that the entire industry would follow.

Every mid-engine Lamborghini since—from the Lamborghini Countach to the Lamborghini Diablo, Lamborghini Murciélago, Lamborghini Aventador, and the hybrid Lamborghini Revuelto—traces its DNA back to the Miura.

The car also cemented Lamborghini’s reputation for fearless engineering and dramatic design.

In 2026, the company is marking the Miura’s anniversary with events around the world, including a heritage tour organized by Lamborghini’s Polo Storico department through northern Italy.

But perhaps the greatest tribute to the Miura is simpler than that.

Nearly 60 years after its debut, it still looks like the future.

And that’s the thing about true icons: they don’t age. They just keep rewriting the definition of cool.

Source: Lamborghini

Story

How the Bugatti Veyron Redefined What a Road Car Could Be

Two decades later, the Bugatti Veyron still feels less like a car and more like a punctuation mark—an emphatic, titanium-reinforced period at the end of an era when engineers were still supposed to color inside the lines. Before electrification rewrote the rules and before hypercar became a marketing category, the Veyron arrived and casually doubled the world’s expectations. Not nudged. Doubled.

For Loris Bicocchi, the man tasked with finding the edge of that madness—and then leaning on it—the Veyron didn’t just reset benchmarks. It erased them.

Bicocchi wasn’t new to Bugatti when the Veyron program began. In the early 1990s, he had already helped shake down the EB110 GT and the even more feral EB110 SS, cars that proved Bugatti’s four-wheel-drive obsession could coexist with genuine supercar violence. Those machines were fast enough to recalibrate your sense of speed. The Veyron, however, demanded a factory reset.

When Bugatti called in 2001, Bicocchi knew only the rumors. Everyone did. A thousand horsepower. Four hundred kilometers per hour. Sixteen cylinders. Sixteen. Even today, the spec sheet reads like a typo. Back then, it sounded like science fiction whispered through paddocks and test tracks.

His first drive came at Michelin’s Ladoux test facility in Clermont-Ferrand, in a red-and-black prototype that carried more expectations than body panels. Bicocchi didn’t wait for the official schedule. He climbed in on Sunday, before the engineers arrived, just to feel the thing. By Monday morning, he was vibrating with impressions.

And disbelief.

At the time, the Veyron produced roughly twice the power of anything else you could theoretically register and insure. That wasn’t a performance gap; it was a canyon. Bicocchi, a driver whose résumé included the fastest cars of their respective generations, had nothing to compare it to. There was no mental filing cabinet labeled “what this feels like.” Full throttle wasn’t even an option at first. The experience bordered on the surreal.

That sense of the unknown defined the entire program. Once you crest 300 km/h, Bicocchi explains, the physics you’ve relied on your entire career quietly pack up and leave. Aerodynamics stop being a supporting character and take over the story. Stability becomes a negotiation. Every millimeter, every contour, every algorithm matters. At 400 km/h, you’re no longer driving so much as managing consequences.

And yet, the Veyron’s mission was never just speed. That was the easy headline. The real challenge—the one that kept engineers awake—was Bugatti’s insistence that this 1001-hp projectile behave like a car. Not a race car. A car. Something that a wealthy amateur could drive, confidently, without a racing license or a death wish.

That requirement fundamentally changed the testing brief. Bicocchi wasn’t just asked to find the limit; he was asked to civilize it. Throttle response, brake feel, stability at speeds where airplanes start having opinions—all of it had to be intuitive. Forgiving, even. The Veyron needed to be a hypercar that didn’t punish curiosity.

That responsibility weighed heavily. Bicocchi describes the program as a 360-degree strike force: engineers, tire suppliers, aerodynamicists, and drivers learning in real time because no one, anywhere, had done this before. There was no rulebook for a 400-km/h road car. They were writing it at speed.

Between test sessions scattered across the globe, Bicocchi immersed himself in Bugatti’s past. Not as nostalgia, but as grounding. Ettore Bugatti’s original vision wasn’t just about performance—it was about elegance, confidence, and mechanical honesty. The Veyron wasn’t a deviation from that philosophy; it was its most extreme expression.

One moment crystallizes the entire project. At Volkswagen’s Ehra-Lessien test track, Bicocchi was instructed to accelerate flat-out past 400 km/h and then stand on the brakes. It’s the kind of request that makes your internal monologue go quiet. Stress and exhilaration collide at that speed. When it worked—when the car remained stable, controllable, obedient—the relief was collective. That’s when the project stopped feeling like a job and started feeling like history.

Twenty-plus years later, the emotion hasn’t dulled. The Veyron still lands with the same force it did in the early 2000s because it isn’t anchored to a trend. Its design doesn’t scream a specific decade. Its achievement doesn’t rely on nostalgia. It simply exists, complete and unapologetic.

That’s the Veyron’s real legacy. Not just that it went faster than anything else, but that it did so without excuses. It didn’t require compromise from its driver. It didn’t ask you to be brave. It asked you to trust it—and then proved worthy of that trust at speeds no road car had ever seen.

As Bugatti continues to redefine the outer limits of the hypercar, the Veyron remains the reference point. The moment when impossible became production-ready. The car that forced the industry to admit that the ceiling was higher than anyone had dared to imagine.

Some cars age. Some become classics. The Veyron stands apart, timeless not because time has been kind to it, but because it never belonged to any era in the first place.

Source: Bugatti