Kia Stinger vs Bentley Flying Spur

What's the difference?

There is nothing quite like a car company occasionally building a car that could be considered a risk. And there are all kinds of risks in the car business - the market isn't ready for that car, people don't identify your brand with this or that type of vehicle, the list goes on. And it's long. It's very easy for me to sit on the sidelines and say, "Pft, what were they thinking?" Few cars land on your driveway without years of thinking having already gone into their development.

The Kia Stinger is the kind of car that would have caused lots of thinking and plenty of hand-wringing at Kia HQ in Korea. Not because it was a bad idea - it wasn't. Not because it's a bad car - it is, in fact, the opposite. And not because SUVs have already changed the way we look at cars - Kia has done well out of that.

It's just that Kia has never produced a car like the Stinger. A five-door coupe-sedan, rear-wheel drive and with a focus on driver dynamics. Most of us know very well how the Stinger GT burst on to the scene in a blaze of well-deserved glory. It's not all about the GT, though. There's a whole range of Stingers and just below that very accomplished sports sedan is the Stinger GT-Line.

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.