Bentley Flying Spur V8 | PH Used Buying Guide

Bentley's outgoing four-door flagship was arguably at its best in V8 form - here's what to look for

By Tony Middlehurst / Sunday, 8 June 2025 / Loading comments

Key considerations

Available for £112,000
4.0-litre V8 twin-turbocharged petrol, all-wheel drive
Sportier than a W12 and not much slower than it
BMW’s iDrive infotainment is arguably better…
…but the Bentley is so much more special in so many ways
If you can afford it, a real treat for your family (and yourself)

Designed, engineered and hand-crafted in Britain for launch in the summer of 2019, the third generation of the Flying Spur was described by Bentley as a unique combination of limousine luxury and sports sedan performance.

There had been a near five-decade gap between the first Flying Spur, the S1 Continental of 1958, and the first modern-era Continental Flying Spur of 2005. The 2019-on model that we’re looking at here is the third generation Spur, a gen-two car having come out in 2013 with the Continental part of the name deleted. All three modern Flying Spurs were designed, engineered, developed and built at Crewe. The gen-three was a genuinely new model too, its revised platform adding 130mm to the wheelbase of the gen-two car.

It’s not easy to put across a sporty look in a huge (2.3 tonnes) four-door saloon, but Bentley has more or less managed it in every iteration of this model. OK, maybe ‘sporty’ is putting it a bit strong. ‘Informal’ might be a better word. ‘Commanding’ might be another. Even with those chronological chasms we just mentioned you could clearly see the style links between the oldest and the newest Spurs. The single cut-crystal effect headlamps of the 2019-on Spur arguably established a stronger visual connection to the ‘50s Spur than its twin-lamped predecessors.

The gen-three Flying Spur began life in 2019 with a 635hp/664lb ft 6.0-litre W12 engine that rushed the big saloon through the 0-60mph run in under four seconds. In 2020 two more powerplants joined the range: a plug-in hybrid combining a 3.0 V6 petrol engine with a 134hp electric motor and 15kWh battery to generate a total power output of 536hp. and a twin-turbo 4.0 V8 with 550hp and 568lb ft. Mulliner V6 Hybrid cars with up to 771hp came along in late 2024 but they’re still big money (£220k and counting) in 2025 so it's the 2020-on 550hp 4.0 V8 Spur we’ll be looking at here.

The starting price for a basic Flying Spur 4.0 V8 in 2020 was £157,300, but basic cars didn’t really exist as buyers could – and did – mix and match from an absolute raft of specification levels and packages. Touring spec lifted the price to £163,700, Mulliner to £172,300, City to £178,500, Mulliner City to £182,000 etc etc. First Edition cars were nearly £203,000. Then you had Blacklines, Speeds, not to mention Diamond Knurling, which turns out not to be the name of a country and western singer, plus four- or five-seat configurations. There were just so many opportunities for individuality and exclusivity. We don’t have the space to go through every spec but as an example the Mulliner pack gave you things like sports pedals, a ‘jewelled’ fuel filler cap, diamond seat quilting and 3D-effect diamond quilted leather door panels.

Each Spur went through a 100-hour plus process of handbuilding by a team of 250 specialists. The use of aluminium extrusions and high-strength steels promised best-in-class body strength and rigidity – but now, five years after its release, is the V8 Spur used buying proposition equally strong?

SPECIFICATION | BENTLEY FLYING SPUR V8

Engine: 3,996cc, twin-turbo V8
Transmission: 8-speed dual-clutch auto, all-wheel drive
Power (hp): 550@6,000rpm
Torque (lb ft): 568@2,000-4,500rpm
0-62mph (secs): 4.1
Top speed (mph): 198
Weight (kg): 2,330
MPG (official combined): 22.2
CO2 (g/km): 288
Wheels (in): 21
Tyres: 265/40 (f), 305/35 (r)
On sale: 2020-on
Price new: from £157,300
Price now: from £112,000

Note for reference: car weight and power data are hard to pin down with absolute certainty. For consistency, we use the same source for all our guides. We hope the data we use is right more often than it’s wrong. Our advice is to treat it as relative rather than definitive.

ENGINE & GEARBOX

The Spur’s twin-turbo 4.0 V8 engine will be familiar to owners of Porsche Panameras and Audi RS Q8s. Having that motor under the bonnet contributed to the V8 Spur model coming in more than 100kg lighter than the 6.0 W12 variant, not only ensuring that it wouldn’t be far behind the big boy on performance but also holding out the prospect of sweeter handling to boot. Underlining that promise was a more aggressive exhaust note than the W12, which in normal use was largely silent.

The gearbox was ZF’s 8ZF-DT 8-speed dual-clutch unit as used in the Continental GT. Although that meant faster changes than you would have had with a torque converter box it also meant slightly more jaggedy take-offs in stop-start traffic, along with the occasional lurch when lifting off at speed. The top two gears were overdriven for more economical cruising. Top speed was achieved in sixth.

The V8’s 0-62mph time of 4.1 seconds was impressive enough for a 2.3-tonne car but perhaps not quite as impressive as whooshing from 0-100mph in just 8.9sec and going on from there to 198mph. Your passengers might be screaming for mercy and the car would be wolfing significant quantities of fuel at that point, but if you didn’t care about either of those things the old-school tank capacity of 20 gallons meant that even at such a prodigious rate of consumption you could keep giving it the whip for a surprisingly long time. 20 gallons of petrol weighs over 54kg, so you were actually enhancing the driving experience by driving like a madman.

Turbo failures have historically been reported on Audis featuring this V8 engine, and a tech bulletin was put out covering that on earlier Bentleys, but as far as we’re aware it’s not been an issue on these gen-three Spurs. Our usual advice to keep the battery in tip-top shape very much applies however.

CHASSIS

Most drivers sampling all three versions of the Spur would conclude that the V8 was the one that was best suited to the chassis, a goodly portion of which was shared with the Porsche Panamera. Although the FS wasn’t the first Bentley with all-wheel drive it was the first one to have all-wheel steering. Like any car with AWS the rear wheels turned in the same direction as the fronts at speed to provide more stability at speed, but the benefit of tighter steering conferred by the opposite direction turning rear wheels at lower speeds was arguably more useful when piloting the 5.3-metre long Spur around on the Riviera.

The all-wheel-drive system on the old gen-two Spur was permanent with a fixed 40/60 front/rear split. The new car’s AWD arrangement was actively clutched to deliver two-wheel drive to the rear axle and whatever amount of drive was best suited to the front axle in the prevailing conditions of traction and grip. You could configure the Drive Dynamics Mode to send around 350lb ft of torque to the front wheel in Comfort or Bentley modes. Sport and Custom were also available via the chunky knob on the centre console. The difference in Sport mode, which limited the amount of power going to the front end of the car and sharpened up the steering, throttle and suspension settings, was noticeable and worthwhile. All that plus the new-for-Bentley electronic all-wheel steering and a forward-mounted front axle helped to bring a more agile feel to the Spur and a more balanced feel overall than the gen-two had.

The ride provided by the 48-volt Dynamic Ride System was just the tiniest bit two-faced, highly luxurious on big frequency bumps but a touch nibbly over sharper ones. That’s not unusual with air shocks. A Rolls Ghost was softer, but that’s its brand positioning. The upside of the Spur’s suspension was the rigour of its adaptive damping which gave the car a freakish ability to corner with the precision and grip of something much smaller and much less weighty. The chassis was particularly impressive in the factory-suggested Bentley mode, when it simply followed a line and stayed flat at the sort of speeds you’d expect to have it understeering off into the hedgerows. It was a very good car to buy if your back-seat passengers were prone to travel sickness. The active anti-roll bars decoupled when you were on straight roads to maximise comfort.

The 1960 Spur had 15-inch wheels. The smallest wheels you could get on a Spur were 21-inchers in three different styles, with a couple of 22-inch Mulliner designs as options. That tells you something about the size of the vehicle. The iron brake system from the Conti GT included 420mm front discs, which back then were the largest fitted to any production car.

BODYWORK

The Spur was slightly shorter than both the RR Ghost and the Mercedes S600 and the forward mounting of the front axle relative to the gen-two was very obvious from the Bentley’s profile, where there was remarkably little front overhang showing. However it was still comfortably over two metres wide so you needed to exercise care in cramped surroundings. Its strongly creased ‘superformed’ panelwork was stamped out of aluminium, the side section running from the windscreen and over the roof to the rear lights being the biggest single piece of sheet metal fitted to any car at the time.

There were 17 standard paint colours but if you didn’t mind paying for it you could of course have whatever the hell you wanted. There was an optional tilt-and-slide pano sunroof along with electric Alcantara window blinds colour-matched to the other cabin materials. Blackline Specification cars had much of their exterior brightware finished in, well, black: radiator vanes, matrix grilles, side window surrounds, lower door and rear bumper blades, front and rear light bezels, door handles, wing ‘vents’ (which weren’t vents), exhaust outlets and of course the retractable Flying B bonnet mascot, a first on a modern-day Spur. You could order it with 23 illuminated crystal ‘feathers’ in the wings. The cost of the Blackline pack in the UK was £3,500.

At 420 litres the boot space was around 15 per cent smaller than the RR Ghost’s. Some of the space was robbed by the intrusion of the fridge between the rear seats. Although the boot loading lip revealed by pressing the ‘B’ badge on the lid was quite high, the aperture was generously wide and the lush carpeting welcoming. Sturdy metal scuffplating allowed big items to be safely slid in.

INTERIOR

The claim for the Spur was that it had the most complex Bentley interior ever. In terms of the user experience, they could also have claimed it was the nicest Bentley interior ever. Everything you touched or looked at felt high quality. The view directly ahead of the driver was closely related to the Conti GT’s but with a few significant differences. The digital dash was practically the same as the Audi’s Virtual Cockpit but new ‘sculptural’ centre air vents replaced the old bullseyes. If you ticked the Diamond Knurling Specification box there would be literally thousands of tiny individual diamond shapes algorhythmically (is that a word?) cut into those front vents. Somebody at Bentley was given the job of counting them. The answer, should you wish to challenge it for warranty claim purposes, was 5,331. Another 3,500 were in the rear vent and 1,800 more in each B-pillar.

Somebody else calculated that three kilometres of thread were used to stitch together the cabin’s 350 leather pieces, all of which were sourced from Northern European bulls to reduce blemishes caused by parasites. The standard hides came in 15 colours, with five different thread thicknesses used to match whatever function they were tasked with. So for example there was a thinner gauge for the airbags to make sure they went off efficiently without any unnecessary restriction from too-strong threads. That’s deep thinking.

Other cabin high points included lovely new wood veneers and 3D diamond quilted leather door insert options. The ‘floating’ centre console was slightly lower than the Conti’s and had a customisable Panamera-ish 12.3-inch HD touchscreen, which was very good if not quite as good as BMW’s contemporary iDrive. Making its Spur debut was the always-cool Bentley Rotating Display that would spin away the screen and bring up either three analogue dials (ambient temp, compass, timer) or a simple slab of wood. Your Spur could also come with the world’s first 3D wood rear door inserts in open-pore walnut or cherry and finished with 150 milled-in ‘diamonds’. Android Auto and Apple CarPlay were standard, as was a 360-degree top-down camera view. Some cars were recalled to rectify a problem with the holder for that camera which could allow moisture in, reducing image clarity.

In the old days, and maybe even now, the Bentley badge has been seen as the signifier of a ‘sporting’ or ‘driver’s’ Rolls-Royce. The slitty-windowed, heavily-pillared body design of the Flying Spur negatively reinforced that perception by limiting headroom and visibility for anyone, especially those in the rear seats. That was positively counteracted however by the relatively low driving position and the redesign of the seats for extra comfort, which really worked unless you were the fifth person in a 5-seat configured Spur. Otherwise there was no need to feel too sorry for rear seat passengers who, besides having the option of big detachable iPad-type screens on the backs of the front seats, also had a pop-out touch screen down by their knees. This gave them independent control of a range of options like window blinds, massage and mood lighting alongside the normal stuff like climate control. You could even use it to drop the Flying B mascot from the back seats. There was a recall on some ’21-’23 Spurs to sort out incorrectly installed rear entertainment screen brackets. ’20-’22 cars were brought in to fix potential issues with the front seat belt assemblies.

As you’d expect, there wasn’t much noise inside a Spur. Magazine tests suggested it was on a par with a Mercedes S-Class, which was a very good par to be on. Your whispering could be even quieter in a Rolls Phantom but in terms of noise suppression that car was exceptional. If you actually wanted high noise levels in your Spur you could pay a lot of money to have Bentley install a Naim 2,200-watt 19-speaker system with active bass transducers in the front seats. They reckoned it was the loudest manufacturer-fitted car audio ever. Slightly less expensive was a Bang & Olufsen 1,500-watt 16-speaker system with illuminated grilles and BeoSonic one-touch tone setting. The basic 10-speaker Bose setup was hardly feeble by normal car audio standards at 650 watts.

HVAC controls and indeed Spur controls generally were easy to understand and a pleasure to use. There were plenty of storage opportunities in the cabin and the glovebox was refrigerated. Surprisingly, automatic cruise control with assisted steering was a cost extra.

PH VERDICT

Not so very long ago most of us were thinking that the saloon was a dying breed. That’s more or less still the case in the West, but the acceleration and polarisation of wealth in the East (both Middle and East East) and the enduring appeal of rear-seat travel in those regions have encouraged premium manufacturers to keep going in this game. As a result, luxury salooning has developed into a deeply impressive sector as cars like the Bentley Flying Spur, Rolls-Royce Ghost, Mercedes S Class and others continue to demonstrate.

If you believe that Bentley or Rolls-Royce are the only real choices in that pure luxe market, which way would you go? Some might say that Rolls-Royce is showing more signs of brand dilution than Bentley. Others might express that view in a more forthright fashion. In a W12 Spur forum on PistonHeads Louis Balfour told us that he’d been around both factories and that he’d noticed BMW-labelled parts bins in the RR plant but no such overt references to VW in the Bentley plant. Although he respected both marques he said that he preferred the image of the Bentley.

So might you. Certainly, enough people have felt that way for the modern-era Flying Spur to become a sales hit for this evocative marque. By August 2020 some 40,000 Spurs had been made over a 15-year period. Half of them were exported to China and America, and around 40 per cent to Europe, the Middle East and Asia Pacific, leaving 10 per cent in the UK. That’s enough across the three generations to give potential used buyers a fair choice, but owners of the gen-three cars do seem to be hanging on to them because there aren’t that many of those about on the secondhand market. That’s totally understandable as it’s a superior car in most if not all respects not only to the gen-two but to anything else you might come up with as a direct rival.

Early 4.0 V8s aren’t as common as the W12s, but they do become more numerous – and more expensive, obviously – the newer they get. The most affordable 4.0 V8 we found for sale in the UK in June 2025 was this 41,000-miler from 2020 at just under £112,000. Sounds like a lot of money, but it’s actually not that much when you take into account the degree of luxury and the sheer amount of stuff, much of it handmade, that you’re getting in one of these. That car has the top-end Naim audio setup too.

What else will £112k buy? The answer to that is not quite a low-mileage ’23-’24 Porsche 911 Carrera GTS, not quite a 2019 Ferrari Portofino and not quite a 2019 AMG G63. All very different cars of course, but there’s something about a Flying Spur that few other similarly priced cars can carry off. We’ve found no evidence of any inherent problems with the gen-three V8, which we’d argue is the best all-round choice of the three engine formats for this car, taking into account its combination of more than ample performance and sweet chassis balance.

If you’re blessed with more cash than you know what to do with £132,500 gets you this sported-up 26,000-mile car from 2022 with both the Touring and the Styling spec packages and 22-inch wheels. Apparently this one, a Blackline/Mulliner/Touring from 2022 but only 49 miles is sold, but when it was in an unsold state on PH Classifieds the price was a nadger’s quiff under £155k.

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