When Bentley Learned to Drift

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

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