Bentley Continental GT - Ultratank
The Bentley Continental GT Ultratank is exactly what the name promises: a genuine Bentley Continental GT grand tourer, with its immaculate leather interior intact, converted into a tracked off-road vehicle by Russian YouTube mechanics from the channel AcademeG. The result is one of the most absurd and entertaining custom vehicle projects in recent memory, and probably the most luxurious tank ever made.
The Starting Point: A Ruined Continental GT With a Perfect Interior
The AcademeG team went looking for the cheapest Bentley Continental GT they could find, and they found one with a predictably catastrophic mechanical history. The W12 engine was in poor condition, the drivetrain had seen better decades, and the repair list was essentially endless. What made the car perfect for their purposes was the interior: immaculate wood, leather and Bentley craftsmanship, undamaged and intact. That contrast between mechanical disaster and cabin perfection was exactly the absurdity they were after. The plan was to take the body they wanted and build an entirely new machine underneath it.
Engineering the Ultratank: Tracks, Differential and a Toyota V8
The Bentley body was lifted off its original platform and mounted atop a custom-fabricated steel tube frame, purpose-built to accept the tank tread system. The original W12 was removed and replaced with a Toyota 4.3-litre V8, chosen for its reliability and what the team described as bulletproof toughness. The decision to use a Toyota engine under a Bentley body is, of course, its own comedy, but it is also genuinely pragmatic: maintaining a W12 in a vehicle that will be driven on tracks through rough terrain is not a sensible engineering choice.
Steering the Ultratank required solving a genuine mechanical challenge. To make turns possible on tracks, the team engineered an open differential system that delivers power to one track while stopping the other. The result is a vehicle that can actually change direction, which is more than could be said of many early tracked vehicle experiments. The brakes, by contrast, were not part of the build at the point of the initial reveal. Stopping is achieved by steering: sawing at the wheel brakes the inside tread and initiates a turn that bleeds speed. The top speed sits at around 31 mph, with the team expressing ambitions to double that figure through further tuning.
The First Tests and What Comes Next
The first test sessions revealed the expected teething problems. Track tension was insufficient, and the rubber nubs that align the tracks with the wheels were not strong enough to handle hard cornering, causing the tracks to roll off during aggressive manoeuvring. Despite this, the test was declared a success. The team planned to tune the engine, add doors to the open body structure, and refine the track system. As unfinished experiments go, the Ultratank already worked well enough to be genuinely thrilling.
The project was covered by Autoblog and InsideHook when it first emerged, both of whom appreciated it for what it is: a genuinely extraordinary piece of mechanical absurdism that asks what a luxury grand tourer becomes when you remove every assumption about what it should be.
The Custom Vehicle Ethos and TheArsenale
The Ultratank fits into a long tradition of custom vehicle builds that prioritise concept and execution over convention. At TheArsenale, we have always been drawn to the projects that ask interesting questions about what a vehicle can be. Explore the TheArsenale selected cars collection for the custom and rare vehicles that represent this spirit most compellingly. If you are looking for something at the extreme end of the armoured and off-road vehicle world, the Rezvani Tank and the Rezvani Hercules 6x6 occupy a similar territory to the Ultratank: vehicles that have been engineered to be maximally imposing and completely unlike anything else on or off the road.
