Although there is no formal definition, the UK government recognises a mountain to be any peak greater than 2000ft, of which well over 100 exist within the UK.
And given the vastness of the great Brecon Beacons and Snowdonia national parks, you might expect Wales to be home to a fair chunk of them. But it’s not. It has just eight.
The two most famous are the 2907ft Pen y Fan, which lies south-west of Brecon, and the 3560ft Snowdon, the highest in respectively the south and north of the country.
Handily for a hack looking for a hook to a story about two huge, powerful cars, the route between these two huge, powerful peaks takes in some of the best driving roads in this or any other country in our still intact United Kingdom.
The Bentley Continental GT you will know, for it has been a fairly frequent presence on these pages since its launch in 2003, and despite being regularly and at least once comprehensively updated on the way, it remains essentially the same car.
The 6.0-litre twin-turbo W12 motor powering this Speed version isn’t that much changed, either. Yes, its power output has been tickled up by another 10bhp to 626bhp, but given that this engine developed 552bhp in basic form upon introduction over a decade ago, that’s not such a leap.
Then again, and for these purposes at least, there’s some benefit to its consistency, for its role here is the provide the benchmark for the other car now pulling into the car park opposite the Storey Arms on the A470, the start point for most hikers on their way up Pen y Fan.
That car is, of course, the Mercedes-Benz S-class coupé, perhaps better known as the replacement for the CL. In S63 AMG guise as tested here, its 5.5-litre twin-turbo V8 has a trifling 577bhp but, lacking the Bentley’s four-wheel drive hardware, it weighs a quarter of a tonne less despite being both longer and taller.
The upshot is a fractional power-to-weight advantage to Mercedes that would matter little were it not backed by a monstrous torque-to-weight advantage, too. The Speed is Bentley’s fastest road car yet and it looks likely to be blown to dust by a Mercedes based on a pre-existing saloon with a smaller engine and fewer cylinders.
The price differential between them makes painful reading, too, for Bentley fans. At £156,700, the Speed costs over £30,000 more than its rival, money that the Merc buyer could spend speccing his car to the nines or just buying a brand-new Lotus Elise for a bit of fun on the side.
Read the Bentley Continental GT Speed first drive
And I can think of no other two-door car, save a Rolls-Royce Wraith, capable of making the Bentley look so small. But it does: the Mercedes coupé might sit on a shorter wheelbase than an S-class saloon but it still logs in at well over five metres in length, longer even than four-door rivals such as the Porsche Panamera and Aston Martin Rapide S. Its lines flow beautifully, but next to it, the Bentley looks taut, compact and purposeful.
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Dashed hopes
@abkq
Beauty in motion.