Top Gear’s bonkers Bentley Bacalar

The boys at Top Gear were allowed to play with Bentley’s exclusive Milliner configurator, and came up with this. Photo: TopGear.com

We fear the boys at Top Gear may have been in lockdown too long in the UK, and have taken to day drinking when they created a one-off Bentley.

Bentley has created 12 Bacalars at NZ$3million each but the luxury British brand approached Top Gear to see if one of the writers would like to try their hand at design.

Ollie Kew stepped forward and the result? Well, don’t give up your day job Ollie.

With the help of head of exterior design, John Paul ‘JP’ Gregory and Maria Mulder, Bentley’s expert head of colour and trim, Top Gear came up with this minty fresh Bacalar.

Luckily it only lives in the configurator and the brand doesn’t have any plans to recreate it. We hope.

Bentley Mulliner’s configurator is the same as the one you can have a play with on the main Bentley website. You choose a colour; whether you want wood or carbon or metal trim, maybe play about with the grille finish. 

The rear is royal blue, the front is light aqua. Photo: TopGear.com

When speccing a Bacalar, you don’t get a set of colours. There’s not a black, a green, a red and so on. So as Kew described the process you “decide the colour – any colour – and then it’s up to Bentley Mulliner to go away and actually concoct it, then get it to match across panels, leathers and trim”. 

He started with a blue.

“Appropriate, since the Bacalar is named after a particularly iridescent lake in Mexico. After about half an hour, we had a Bacalar in a tasteful shade of royal blue, Pirelli print on the rubber (in a modern evocation of whitewall tyres) and we’d experimented with the 5000-year old riverwood trim inside,” said Kew on TopGear.com

Luckily this Bacalar lives in the configurator, not on the road. Photo: TopGear.com

“It was all very respectable and safe, which must’ve irked maverick Gregory, who insisted we did something… madder. How about a two-tone colour split?”

What Gregory wanted was a distinct two colour split front-to-back on the bodywork.

It doesn’t get much better inside either. Photo: TopGear.com

“Locating the ‘join’ between the colours on the door panels made this feasible for production,” said Kew on TopGear.com

And this is where the day drinking theory comes in. Kew picked ‘Light Aqua’ - an exclusive hue from Mulliner.

Hey Bentley, please remove that colour from your palette.