For a company that builds giant luxury vehicles,->ke505 Bentley->ke15 places an awful lot of emphasis on performance. But Bentley's performance image was earned through six Le Mans->ke1591 wins, and the luxury marque has been banking on it with Speed and Supersports models in recent years. That is, there were Supersports models. With the refresh of the Continental->ke3108 in all its various forms, Bentley deemed it unnecessary to have two high-performance trims above the base model, and now the Speed enjoys top billing in the Continental lineup.

Not only has the top performance trim gone away, but word from Bentley is that there are no immediate plans to bring it back. The reason is that Bentley is simply too busy. All of the company's efforts are currently going into bringing the 2016 Bentley Bentayga to the market, and Bentley isn't even stopping there, there is another model in the works after that, quite possibly (hopefully) a production version of the 2015 Bentley EXP 10 Speed 6 concept. Since the Supersports was pretty much a niche car anyway, it doesn't make sense to divert manpower to the project at the moment, although it hasn't been completely ruled out for sometime down the road.

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Why it matters

This all sounds like some sad news for fans of fast Bentleys, but the truth is that it sounds worse than it is. When the Supersports last existed, it produced 621 horsepower and would hit a top speed of 204mph, while the current Speed model churns out 626 horsepower and tops out at 206mph. So the Speed has effectively leapfrogged the performance capabilities of the Supersports, if only just. But just because the Speed is now faster, that doesn't mean that there can't be something even faster still. One possibility is that the track-focused 572-horsepower 2014 Bentley Continental GT3-R could get a an even faster version, especially given that it has been a strong seller, but this is again something that Bentley has no specific plans to do. So it seems that Bentley's priorities lay elsewhere at the moment, but it wouldn't be unrealistic to go back to hoping for a new Supersports in a few years.

2016 Bentley Continental GT

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