Watch A Bentley Flying Spur Set A Very Specific Lap Record

News of any Bentley setting a lap record at any racetrack is likely to come as a bit of a surprise, especially if that Bentley is the enormous and stately Flying Spur saloon. Unless the record is something overly specific like ‘fastest lap for a luxury hybrid saloon with an entire forests’ worth of polished wood veneer onboard’ or something.

In fact, it’s one of those extremely niche – whisper it, but some might say entirely made-up – records that the Flying Spur Speed has just gone out and set. It’s gone and set a 2:58 lap around the Drivecenter Arena, a circuit you’ve definitely never heard of.

But why is this record special? Well, the Drivecenter Arena is in Sweden. Northern Sweden, in fact. Northern enough to only be about 100 miles outside of the Arctic Circle, and the northernmost active racetrack in the world.

(The word ‘active’ seems to be doing some heavy lifting, as Norway’s Arctic Circle Raceway is further north – still not actually in the Arctic Circle, though, despite the name – but currently appears to be undergoing redevelopment, and thus isn’t active. But we digress.)

The Spur went out and set that record just recently, when the entire track was blanketed in a layer of snow and ice. Granted, if you’re going to go out chasing made-up lap records at wintry racetracks, it’s a good car to do it with: it’s all-wheel drive, for a start, and there’s a small matter of the 761bhp developed by the Speed version when its 4.0-litre twin-turbo V8 hybrid system is running at full capacity.

Despite all that, the Spur still sensibly had some studded tyres fitted, which even on an all-wheel drive car are pretty much required if you want to do anything other than slither about hopelessly at 6mph in these conditions. Indeed, they allowed the driver – presumably after they’d taken a very large brave pill – to hit 120mph on Drivecenter’s 450m long pit straight.

Is all this really just an excuse to broadcast some pretty pictures and video to the world of an enormous Bentley doing big, languid snow drifts? If so, then they’ve got us hook, line and sinker.