Bentley Azure: Give the last bespoke Bentley your speedy attention - and damn the emissions

Specifications

Would suit: Surely Simon Cowell must have one
Price: £222,500
Performance: 168mph, 0-60 in 5.6 seconds
Consumption: 19.5mpg
Further information: Who are you kidding?

Like Henry Royce, W O (Walter Owen) Bentley was a railway man by trade, and it doesn't half show. Here you can see a 1930 4.5 litre Bentley, one of only 50 made and worth around £5m I'm told, together with a brand new £222,500 Azure. They make quite a sight. Big Bentleys are the blue whales of the motoring world: rare, endangered and possessed of a gargantuan grace, each is a storey high and weighs more than a fully loaded Transit van. Personally, it doesn't matter in the slightest that the company that once supplied James Bond with his "Locomotive" is now owned by Volkswagen. If Bentley is still making cars like the Azure, then all must be well with the world.

This is the last true, bespoke Bentley. While the Continentals with which it shares factory space are only assembled and trimmed here, the Azure is built entirely at the Crewe factory. Not only that, but it has at its heart the same engine that has been powering Bentleys since 1959. The PR man, seeing my frown on hearing this, hastened to add that it is 99.5 per cent more efficient than the original, although exhaust emissions of 465g/km are still nothing to shout about.

That said, I think we can say with some confidence that Bentley Azures - all 350 or so that are built each year, with their average annual mileage of 2,000 miles - are probably not the root cause of global warming, not least because Bentleys are built to - and do - last forever, thus writing off the energy used in their manufacture and recycling costs over a far greater timespan than most cars. Take this 1930s Bentley, which was a press car when it was born and is still performing the same function three quarters of a century later. It is a bellowing truck of a car in perfect, patinated working order. Together we rampaged through the Cheshire countryside at an improbable speed for both our ages, the Bentley at least with unexpected composure for its size. It would eat a Toyota Prius for breakfast and spit out the batteries.

The Azure, though obviously a good deal more refined (especially with the new six-speed automatic gearbox which furnished me with my flimsy pretext for trying it), brings a rather different sense of occasion to every journey - I can't imagine P Diddy driving a 1930s Bentley, can you? I drove down to London in one and, to be honest, felt an utter fraud (not least as one of my errands was a meeting with my accountant, which must have given a slightly misleading impression of my finances). But I was impressed by the way the car hammered potholes into submission and lunged forwards when you hit the gas. Getting something that weighs nigh on three tons moving at all is an achievement, getting it to 60mph in 5.6 seconds is borderline phenomenal. No matter, then, that things get a little "nautical" when changing direction.

Back in the factory I watched a handful of Azures slowly edging their way along the production line. It takes around 14 weeks to forge an Azure from steel and wood, leather and glass, compared with a mere five weeks for the uppity celeb's favourite GT Continental.

Several were being finished in fridge white. Though they were destined for Japan, they had been ordered in left-hand drive - an imported car being a symbol of prestige there apparently. Others were being titivated to meet the whims of the idle and misguided rich with garish ostrich-hide seats, zebra-striped woods and, in one instance, a built-in microwave oven. It seemed a rather undignified fate for this royal barge but as competition is hotting up with the imminent arrival of the new, Rolls Royce Phantom Drophead Coupe, I am sure the ever pragmatic W O would have approved. s

It's a classic: Embiricos Bentley

One of the most legendary-bordering-on-mythical of all pre-war Bentleys is the Embiricos Bentley, built in 1938 with a lightweight, two-door body, by the French coachbuilder, Pourtout. I first heard about the car while on holiday in a rented farmhouse in Devon years ago. Rifling through the kitchen drawers - the first thing you do in any rented house - I found photos of a beautiful, streamlined special, based, the caption said, on a 41/4-litre chassis. I later discovered that it was designed by a French dentist for Paris-based Greek banker Andre Embiricos and was recorded at 114mph at Brooklands. Astonishingly, 10 years after it was built, it finished sixth at Le Mans - an unthinkable achievement for a 10-year-old racing car today - and also competed in 1950 and 1951. It was, perhaps, the world's first supercar and would almost certainly set a world record were it auctioned today. It now belongs to an American Bentley collector.