Bentley Mulsanne Speed in the Everglades

I have just been bitten by an alligator.

Admittedly, the 'gator in question is only 10 inches long, and being lightly chewed by a common American Alligator mississippiensis in the first couple of years of life is more uncomfortable than fatal, but still, it left a mark, and it makes for a better story than the feeble yet numerous welts left by mosquitoes that currently occupy roughly a third of my exposed skin. The Everglades, it has to be said, are chock-full of biting things. Things that crawl, slither, swim and fly through the swampland of southern Florida, all intent - apparently - upon feasting on imported British flesh. The only place to escape from such carnivorousness is to jump into the car, in this case the new Mulsanne Speed, Bentley's über-limo, a giant burnt-orange behemoth that represents the Crewe firm's new range-topper. It sits glinting in the soft southern light like a particularly unselfconscious ode to excess: massive, solid and patently, reassuringly expensive.

Pictures: Jamie Lipman

This feature originally appeared in the January 2015 issue of Top Gear Magazine

There's a burly thump to the doors, a density and meaty perfume to the interior space that reminds you what you're paying for, and a five-foot alligator lounging on the centre armrest. Oh. This one is slightly more ambitious than the yearlings, what with teeth that crowd its jaw so fully that they escape the event horizon of its actual mouth. We stare at each other for a bit, and if you've ever tried to out-stare the vertical slit of an alligator's pearl-yellow eye, you'll know who blinked first. I'm... unsure of what to do next. It's true that Mulliner - Bentley's personal commissioning department - will trim your Mulsanne pretty much any way you want it, but I thought that generally involved skins rather than accessories that eye your exposed parts with patiently reptilian hunger. But this is what you get when you make friends with people who own an alligator farm, and decide to take pictures with a Bentley. And while our reptile-wranglers Luke and Mario are busily arranging alligator flesh for us, we also discover an airboat captain called Quentin who has an exact replica of a Bentley emblem tattooed the length of his left forearm. You just couldn't make this stuff up. It's quite overwhelming. So the stowaway and me just sit in amiable man-and-misplaced-dinosaur silence until someone comes to help. Then photographer Jamie and I fire up the Bentley, and head further into the Everglades. After all, it can't get any weirder.

Obviously, it can. Several hours later, while trying to find a corner other than a 90° with a stop sign, and on a dirt road that slices between monstrous acreages of swamp, a disturbed and furiously beating heron drops a fish on the Bentley. Literally. An armoured lump that looks like a cross between a horseshoe crab and catfish, strangely heavy and thoroughly dead. We identify it as a half-rotten Floridian plecostomus and throw it into the water only for it to dart away, very much alive. Alive after having been attacked by a large predatory bird, dropped from 30 feet onto a British limousine, kept from the water and then prodded by an inquisitive human. They build them hardcore around here, sticking to the mitochondrial blueprints of prehistory. But it sure wasn't pretty. Everything here seems a bit... primitive. Effective, yes, survivability off the scale, but you get the feeling the fundamental premise hasn't changed in a very long time.

The same accusation could be levelled at the Bentley. It's the latest in a long line of generously proportioned limousines/grand tourers with sporting bent, traditional high-class powerhouses. And even if the current Mulsanne isn't exactly fossil-worthy (having only appeared in 2010), the last standard-bearer survived from 1980 until '92 (pre the Arnage), and the 6.75-litre V8 that powers it can trace its ancestry back to the late Fifties. In car terms, that's eons. There have been changes, mind. The latest version of the engine featuring in the Speed produces more than 150 per cent more bhp and torque than its grandfather, yet has 40 per cent better fuel economy and produces 99.5 per cent less rubbish from the exhaust. In fact, there's a rumour that the 2014 engine should be able to idle using nothing but the emissions of the 1959 motor. Which is a wonderful pub fact.

Time's eternal march also means that with all of the changes and refinements - plus a pair of decently sized turbos - the six-and-three-quarter also manages to propel the big orange bus with vim and vigour. It may only have 25bhp more than a standard Mulsanne to give a total of 530bhp, but it also has an extra 59lb ft. That amounts to a barrel-chested 811lb ft of torque, this time delivered from a snake's belly 1,750rpm up to 4,200rpm, rendered across that spread as a featureless plateau. The Speed may be several metres of massive and 2,685kg of precious, but the way the new engine makes torque is gravitational, and energetic enough to force 62mph in a faintly bizarre 4.9 seconds, 0-100mph in 11.1 and on to a top speed of 190mph. At that speed, you're talking about an awful lot of potential energy and momentum.

It's worth noting that it doesn't feel like it. What with the double glazing and a small hatchback's worth of sound-deadening, the Mulsanne always feels beautifully isolated, all the better for fending off Evergladian nature. The only real impression of physical speed is the fact that the Mulsanne rears up slightly under hard acceleration, and firmly dumps the cars in the windscreen into the frame of the rear-view mirror. It's quite a disconcerting trick at full throttle, mainly because of all that thumping torque and feeling of inexorable mass - something this big really shouldn't be able to haul like it does. It's like watching an elephant gallop off like a greyhound.

The thing is, we're in Florida, in the Everglades. Which means dyke-straight roads and sea-level views. The speed limits are low, the potential to challenge the Mulsanne's speedy nature hard to find. We constantly cut through back roads looking for something interesting to drive on, and get gradually more and more involved in the backcountry. It really is an odd environment, this. The overriding impression is that the swamp is a patient place, a locale that never rushes. There are no grand framed views, or striking mountains, no epic natural focal points. The predators tend to be of the ambush variety, quiet and still. And yet it's beautiful, and absolutely stuffed to the lungs with animal life. Great meadows of swamp grass standing in two feet of water make for a whispering, twinkly horizon. Stands of drowned trees add a faint whiff of haunting and Scooby-Doo. Lumps and stutters of hillocks give brief respite from the water, breaching the surface like the backbone of some giant animal. It's all resolutely flat, so there's a gaping maw of wide-open space, a drowned safari where the lions are replaced by alligators. It is also, invariably, very straight. With no natural obstructions to negotiate, the road building tends towards the unimaginatively practical and crow-flies tactical.

Still, there are worse places to be than in a Mulsanne. The eight-speed ZF auto 'box flickers through its ratios with immaculate timing, and although the air suspension has been retuned for better reactions, the Speed never feels anything less than composed. It rides regally, and because it's so damn big, you get a real feeling of power - only an SUV has a taller seating position, and even then not by much. Play with the Drive programmes on the small rotary dial on the centre console, and you can alter various settings like steering weight, throttle response and suspension damping. Do so, and although you don't immediately change the essential nature of the Speed, you can tighten it up quite considerably - and it starts to feel properly quick. If anything, it gets most surreal in Sport, simply because the torque is limited in the lower gears to prevent great gobs of wheelspin (and traction-control intervention), which is out of character for a car like this. Thus, you get a feeling of more power the faster you go. It's characterful and exceptional, and one of the times that the Bentley starts to have a much more defined sporting nature than, say, a Rolls-Royce Phantom. Which is equally big and stately, but not quite so keen. But it is getting a mite frustrating. We've done a fair bit of accelerative investigation and subsequent deceleration (the brakes are mighty, but can fade after a few - ahem - decent stops), but not much actual cornering. We stop for the night, and I make some phone calls. I have an idea. It is probably not a compliment when most people wince when I say that.

The next day sees us pulling up to the longest corner in all of Florida.

Somewhere I can finally find out whether the Mulsanne Speed is actually any good at going fast in something other than a straight line. The Homestead-Miami Speedway: 1.5 miles of oval, with 18-20° of variable banking and a lap record of 1 minute 13 seconds. It's also the place where the final race of the NASCAR season is traditionally held, a race that took place... yesterday. So there's quite a lot of clearing up being done after Kevin Harvick's Sprint Car Cup Series win 12 hours ago - and although his trailer is still in the paddock, we don't dare knock. After a little red carpet impostorship and pit garage preparation while we wait for the track to be jet-dried - apparently if the tarmac isn't prepared after rainfall, you can literally slip off the banking - we head out for a bit of Speedway action.

Now, obviously, the Speed was never intended as a track car, but you do get a certain thrill from booting such an imperious battleship around a NASCAR oval, for no other reason than it looks spectacular. The adaptive cruise control bongs mournfully, irritated at the amount of lateral lean in turn two, but the Speed's composure is nothing short of extraordinary. Where it should feel massive and blunt, it's actually quite wieldy, tracking straight and true, carving through the odd apex with grace. No, you never really rid yourself of the impression that this is a big car, but it certainly doesn't wallow like you think it might. In fact, the Speed starts to manage two quite contradictory personalities: a ‘sporting limousine' is about as daft and pretentious as it gets, but somehow you begin to understand where the Speed meets the brief. It's not a track warrior - I'm not sure the brakes would be up to it, though there is a carbon-ceramic option on the list - but there's a definite feeling that even though there's a private jet's worth of legroom and iPad-laden office space in the back, this is a Mulsanne that you might be more prone to drive than be driven in.

Which is exactly what Bentley was aiming for. I'm not sure the company was exactly thinking that many Mulsanne Speed owners would be marvelling at the car's stability at the exit of turn four of a NASCAR track, the scuffed and scraped wall and catch fencing blurring past inches from the passenger window, or revelling in the basso-bellow of the V8 as it pulled away from a famous start line, but as far as it's possible to do two contradictory things at once, the Mulsanne Speed is doing a grand job. It's the rub-your-tummy-pat-your-head of automobiles.

Just as we complete what must be our eighth lap - somewhat off prototype record pace, it has to be said - and the wall inches ever closer, I suddenly remember that this is not a cheap option, and slow down a bit. The Speed costs £25k more than a standard Mulsanne, and the version we have here is a healthy £306 grand, thanks to decidedly profligate optioning including more than £20,000-worth of entertainment specification, eight thousand pounds of refrigerated bottle cooler (plus bespoke crystal champagne flutes, obviously), three and a half thousand pounds of Hand Cross Stitching and a couple of grand's worth of Carbon-Fibre Waistrail Inlays. Plus other stuff. It's a bit confusing that such things as adaptive cruise control (£2,920) and a rear-view camera (£1,400) aren't standard, but, hey, I'm not a millionaire, so perhaps they don't notice that you get all that stuff on a VW Golf GTI for nothing.

That's probably missing the point, though. If you have to ask the price and all that. I doubt many Mulsanne Speed buyers are going to haggle. All I can think is that they'll be buying something faintly exceptional. No, I don't think the Mulsanne is the prettiest limo out there, and I wasn't convinced by the idea when we started. But the Speed is a strange, beguiling amalgam of the old and new, the fast and the luxurious. It's contradictory, but wonderful. Like the Everglades, there's a whole lot more going on just beneath the surface. And also like the Everglades, a lot of that has more teeth than you assume.