Besides hell, the name of which immediately
conjures brimstone and damnation, few things have the indelibility of
Rolls-Royce. Anyone will tell you a Rolls is formal, upright, superlative, and
best enjoyed from the rear. So what are we to make of the marque’s new Wraith,
a canted, fastback, $300,000 coupe with a 624-hp twin-turbo V-12 and a claim to
be the company’s fastest-ever car?
After a day of driving and being driven
around in the Wraith’s stately swoopiness, we can legitimately call it the
Rolls-Royce of grand tourers.
This is a vehicle that’s meant to be
driven, a fact the Wraith announces immediately with its thick-rimmed steering
wheel—or thick for a Rolls, which means a diameter larger than a fetus’s
fibula, to say nothing of a circumference that’s a Breitling Montbrillant to
the brand’s usual Big Ben. Another clue is the fact that the Wraith has four
seats but only two doors. And while its rear buckets are adult-comfortable,
even over multiple hours, egress from one of the car’s suicide doors forces
contortions that detract from one’s elegance.
The
Wraith is a true ground-breaker – not only the most powerful car in Rolls’
history but also the closest thing to a sports car that it has ever attempted
to produce
Then there’s the power. The onset and
delivery of a Rolls’s output is ordinarily some standard deviation removed from
that of mortal vehicles: seemingly infinite, yet utterly unobtrusive. If you
felt the transmission shift, heard the engine roar, or perceived the tires’
existence, the car would die of shame.
The Wraith follows this prescription, but
with an additional soupçon of feedback. Never enough to tarnish your wafting,
of course; there’s nothing here as déclassé as a tachometer, paddle shifters,
or a gear indicator. But you can hear the turbos whoosh and sense the exhaust’s
distant rumble. Power, though enough to hurtle the 5,200-pound coupe to 60 mph
in a claimed 4.4 seconds, does not have the instant, throat-clearing arrival of
something like an AMG Mercedes. That would be undignified. There is plenty of
waltz in this yacht’s hustle.
The Wraith’s ZF-sourced eight-speed
automatic uses GPS and navigation data to help predict when power will be
needed, and to select the proper gear for a given situation. But despite the
hills, valleys, and twisties where we drove, we felt nothing unusual. Trust
Goodwood to know that, as is the case with plastic surgery, the best
satellite-aided transmission feels like you have no satellite-aided
transmission at all.
Perched
upright, you survey a cabin of breath-taking sumptuousness, peerless material
richness and excellent quality
As tempered as the Wraith is by its magic
suspension carpet of electronically controlled air bladders, you can still feel
the car roll through the bends. Which is good. If you’re one of the youngish
Silicon Valley or Bangalorean technocrats meant to buy it, you should be
reminded that this is a formal car, meant for dominating sweepers and highways,
not tossing through hairpins. Less track cleat; more Bottega Veneta
block-heeled loafer.
The interior furthers this trend of casual
exquisiteness. Imagine Versailles renovated by Sir Norman Foster: unbridled
corporate minimalism, sprinkled liberally with delight. The open-grain wood
panels in the doors are the size of an Aboriginal bowman’s shield, and their
marquetry is just as fastidious. The new touch pad atop the infotainment
controller is as functional as its Spirit of Ecstasy imprint is ghostly. And
the 1,340 fiber-optic pin lights in the Starlight headliner dazzle as
unceasingly as the Pleiades.
Access
to the back isn't bad, and the space in the second row is more than sufficient
for two average-sized adults
Could there be more metal in the “chrome”
overhead console? Yes. Is the forthcoming convertible version this car’s killer
app? Perhaps. Does the Wraith’s combination of grace, puissance, and
exclusivity make you mutter “Bentley Continental who?” Of course. A Rolls’s
existence is predicated in its ability to erase the competition. This
philosophy must be working, because it has, in fact, no competition.
