One-of-one Bentley Continental GT3-R for sale

For a company that doesn’t know the meaning of ‘light’, Bentley sure knows how to put together a world-beating race car. As you’ll likely recall, the British marque was unstoppable at Le Mans, winning in 1924 (101 years ago!) with the gorgeous 3.0-litre, before claiming three victories on the bounce in ’27, ’28 and ’29. Then, 74 years after its last victory, Bentley would triumph once again at La Sarthe, this time with a fully-fledged prototype driven by Le Mans legends Tom Kristensen, Rinaldo Capello and Guy Smith.

That was Bentley’s last outing at Le Mans and a decade-long break from motorsport followed. It then burst back onto the scene in 2013 with the beefy Continental GT3, built by M-Sport (the squad behind Ford’s WRC car) and driven to multiple GT race victories the world over. Goes to show how brainy the M-Sport boffins are, because the towering Conti stuck out like a sore thumb in grids brimming with low-slung supercars like the Audi R8, Ferrari 488 and Lamborghini Huracans. Then Bentley decided it wanted to take them on away from the track with the limited-run Continental GT3-R like the one we have here.

With a name like GT3-R, you’d expect Bentley’s big old brute to have been put through a crash diet, stiffened beyond belief and adorned with some ginormous aero appendages. What we got though, was a very Bentley take on the track-inspired special. To its credit, the company did have a good go at lightening the Conti, with an Akrapovik titanium exhaust system, forged 21-inch alloy wheels and the removal of the rear seats all contributing to a 100kg reduction. Not an insignificant amount, but when a standard Continental of the era was a little over 2.3 tonnes, the weight-saving measures weren’t necessarily transformative.

No matter. Bentley’s rather good at disguising weight, so for the GT3-R it stiffened the anti-roll bars, springs and dampers to keep the body in check. It also received torque-vectoring – the first application in a Bentley – which modulates the inside rear brake mid-corner to help bring the nose to the apex, while the stability control was tweaked to be a little less intrusive. Couple that with a 4.0-litre twin-turbo V8 that had been dialled up to 580hp and 516lb ft of torque, and you got the raciest Bentley road car in decades.

To make it look right, the team bunged on a boot spoiler and some front canards, and devised a suitably sporty green-on-white colour scheme to bring the GT3-R in line with the race car. Unsurprisingly, the visual tweaks proved divisive and many felt the look wasn’t on brand. Nearly all of the 300 examples left Crewe in white, yet somehow the original owner of this particular car managed to persuade Bentley (presumably with a whole load of money) to ditch colour scheme for something a touch more demure. So here the standard white makes way for Anthracite Grey, while the green has been replaced with copper hue and the GT3-R stickers removed altogether. The interior’s been kitted out by Mulliner with orange-over-black leather, loads of carbon fibre trim and a TV tuner. If only the standard car could have looked like this.

Admittedly, ‘one-off’ gets thrown around far too much these days and is now being used for cars with unique specs (usually because nobody else would dare choose the same spec). This, however, was only ever made available in one colour, so to see one in anything other than white is novel, especially when it’s a factory job. You’ll need to give the seller a bell to find out the price, but if it really is a unique example of a very rare car and with only 4,000 miles on the clock, expect to pay well north of six figures. But if you’d rather your Bentley subtler still and with a 24 Hour connection, then £379,950 gets you this lovely Continental GT Le Mans Limited Edition and four extra cylinders.