Bentley Continental Supersports is a whiter lighter shade of pale awesome

In the superluxe world, we're used to this maneuver: add a few horsepower, shave a tenth or two, sew in a few extra threads, name your exclusive new interior color something like "Algerian Beet" and voilà, a 50-percent price premium for three-percent more car. On the surface, the Bentley Continental Supersports is a GTC Speed that has gone on The Biggest Loser, Extreme Makeover, and Alter Eco. But you know what they say about the proof and the pudding, so the question is whether the Supersports is a nameplate special or a genuinely higher evolution of the baller's favorite steed. We spent a day in the wilds of New Jersey and upstate New York, along with a few hours at Monticello Raceway to find out. Ladies and gentlemen, allow us to introduce you to the first Continental you can feel.

Think of the Bentley Continental Supersports as Usain Bolt: both are hypothetically too big to perform as they do, but they do it anyway.

The Continental GT is not a sports car. Nor is the Continental Supersports. Nevertheless, both Bentleys do things that only sports cars can do, and the Supersports does some of them more quickly – like 0 to 60 in 3.7 seconds. The difference is in how they do it. In our review of the GTC Speed, we wrote that it achieves these feats by taking the goddess of physics hostage, forcing her to obey. Bentley should be commended for engineering a 5,182-pound beast to perform such feats at all, but it remains an act of coercion.

In the GTC Speed, though, the driver is separated from all that imperative violence by multiple layers of sound deadening, carpeting, wood and leather. If you really pay attention, you can catch a soupcon of the brute force wizardry being conducted somewhere in the Bentley's deathly hallows, but why would you? There are 1,100 distracting watts of Naim audio to command the ears and a woman named Katerina or Genevieve or Summer in the front seat to command everything else.