Bentley Flying Spur vs Toyota Tundra

What's the difference?

In any other super car, it would seem deeply strange, wrong even, to loll (and LOL) in the back seats while a colleague blasts you around a race track at insane speeds, and not just because cars with V12 engines making 575kW and 1000Nm don’t normally have more than two seats.

The Bentley Flying Spur Speed is, of course, no ordinary car, it is a super sedan, a luxe limousine crossed with a rocket ship, and if Sir wants to get to the rooftop helipad in a spectacular hurry, then these are the back seats to be sitting in.

We flew to Japan, and the spectacular setting of the Magarigawa Club, a members-only race track carved out of the rolling hills outside Tokyo at a rumoured cost of $US2 billion, to try the back seats, and the driver’s seat, of the new and very impressive Flying Spur Speed.

The Toyota Tundra, made in America for Americans, was launched in 1999 and since then Toyota Australia has fielded a steady stream of enquiries from car buyers and automotive media about the possibility of its full-size US pickup being available in local showrooms.

Production of RHD Tundras at Toyota’s San Antonio plant in Texas never stacked up as a viable business case for Toyota until 2015, when the Walkinshaw Automotive Group (WAG) commenced OEM-certified right-hand-drive remanufacturing of Ram pick-up trucks (and later Chevrolet Silverados) in Melbourne.

This development finally opened the door to an ‘Australianised’ version of the Tundra, which went on sale late last year after a six-year joint development program with WAG that was a world-first for Toyota.

The Tundra’s local two-model range comprises the entry-level Limited and the new top-shelf Platinum grades, with more power and torque than local ‘1500 class’ US pickup rivals. So, we recently put the fresher Premium model to work for a week, to see how it measures up from a tradie’s perspective.