Watch This Bentley Do 206 mph on an Australian Highway—Legally

The speed is real in the land of Oz.

byClifford Atiyeh|
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Just because half of Volkswagen Group’s brands are in dire straits over dieselgate doesn’t mean Bentleys can’t continue burning petrol at profligate rates. Witness this promo video for Crewe’s Continental GT Speed, filmed as far away from Wolfsburg without leaving the earth itself: Australia.

Like any top speed run, the premise is simple: Close a giant stretch of macadam, open the throttle, verify the run over GPS, pop champagne. Bentley hired Aussie racing ace John Bowe to take command, and he did so without wearing a helmet or hitting a kangaroo across a 120-mile section of Australia’s Stuart Highway, a lonely outback road that splits the country in two. No legal speed limits whatsoever. Bowe didn’t even appear to sweat.

Of course, if it weren’t for death-defying superhuman acts sponsored by unseemly individuals back in the Thirties, it wouldn’t be so easy today to chase such feats. In 1938, with the full support of the Third Reich at his back, Rudolf Caracciola did 268.9 mph in a Mercedes-Benz W125, ever in his resolve “to burn [him]self up to the last fiber, no matter what happens to the ashes.” Uh, yikes.

The Bentley video is slick and sanitized, not unlike the car at its center, but it’s another amazing example of what modern sports cars can do. For $250,000, you, too, can reach 206 mph in this 626-hp 12-cylinder bullet, or you can drop the top in a fake Canadian snowstorm like Drake. The world, as the Aussies know, is your dingo.

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