Mercedes-Benz G63 vs Bentley Flying Spur

What's the difference?

Everything you need to know about the Mercedes-AMG G 63's personality pokes out from underneath the polished alloy steps running down each of its flanks. Side pipes… no one does side pipes.

A colleague was pulled over in a G 63 because the cops thought the '60s muscle car-style exhaust was after-market and illegal. But it's not, and it's brilliant.

Launched globally in early 2018, this brutal take on the second-generation Mercedes-Benz G-Class might look the same as the G 63 it replaces, but under the skin it's a whole new ballgame.

The first-gen was like grandpa's axe, regularly updated but underneath it all the same basic framework. This is a whole new axe, including a fresh drivetrain, suspension set-up and interior treatment.

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.