To Geneva By Rolls-Royce

Why fly Sleasyjet when you can take a £300k Rolls Phantom?

“A Rolls-Royce Phantom, sir? We’ll make sure there’s a space free outside when you arrive. The doorman will keep an eye on it 24 hours a day, and it will be ready straight away if you want to use it…”

You get used to conversations like that when you drive a Phantom, I expect, as life in general seems to become a little more ‘charmed’. The excerpt above was from an advance telephone call to the hotel I was booked into for the Geneva motor show, but had I been a little more used to the ‘Rolls-Royce effect’ I wouldn’t have bothered trying to make sure we’d be able to park safely before turning up. It’s a no-brainer, probably, but arriving anywhere in a Phantom pretty much guarantees you are going to be looked after.

I did wonder, however, whether driving from the UK to Geneva in a Rolls-Royce Phantom press car with a £290,000 price-tag wasn’t also the best way to guarantee that colleague Garlick and I would be hi-jacked by French highwaymen en route. As it turned out, all the responses to our stately progression were positive as far as I could tell.

Garlick takes up the story: "The thing with this car is the way it is received. Drive any car worth the equivalent value (or considerably less in fact) and some will sneer at you and many won't let you out of junctions. But Drive a Rolls- Royce and people smile, they want to talk to you, they want to look inside, they give the thumbs up even.

"We were even 'papped' travelling along some random French autoroute on the way home. I was driving at the time, and spotted that the car in front had moved over to let us pass. As we approached there was movement in the car, so naturally I assumed my best driving pose and floored it past. As expected, many digital SLRs were pointed in our direction and, as soon as we passed they floored it to catch up with us again to get more shots.

Anyway, we needed some fuel (again) and pulled off a few miles up the road only to be followed in by the chaps who snapped us. It turned out that they ran Dutch website autogespot.com and were big fans of PH, too. We chatted and allowed them to pore over the car, before bidding them farewell. Imagine our surprise when we made their homepage the next day..."

One does feel a sort of splendid isolation in a Rolls, both culturally and socially, and especially in the Phantom where the travelling sensation is more akin to being teleported in one’s drawing room than being driven in a car. (One doesn’t have a drawing room? Oh dear…)

As Garlick points out, "There is something pleasantly unnerving about driving a car that is as big as a LWB panel van and costs more than a house at a ridiculous speed, in near silence. You watch as the 'flying lady' shows you her behind as she carves through the recession- filled air of the UK and Europe and it just shouts 'out of my way sir, yes you there in the 7-series, move aside chap, as we are coming through'."

You don’t so much feel that you’re sitting on car seats facing a dashboard, for example, but rather that you’re lounging in a cosy nook with some very expensive furniture and a constantly changing view. I half expected Garlick to slip on a quilted smoking jacket at any moment, but fortunately his barely repressed OCD tendencies meant he was too busy polishing finger-prints off the piano black dashboard to relax properly. (Useful, as we didn’t have a chauffeur to look after that side of things, and I can’t do a French road trip without Pringles.)

Not that you’d miss a chauffeur on this kind of journey, as the Phantom is truly an engaging experience from behind the wheel. In fact, in spite of the lure of that deeply upholstered rear seat, Garlick and I both opted to sit up-front on the entire trip to Geneva and back. (Apart from on the Channel Tunnel, where for 20 minutes we experienced the pleasure of being ‘driven’.)

It’s a vast machine, but you quickly become accustomed to its size, thanks to four-square proportions and a commandingly high seating position that make the car easy to place on the road. Steering is of the fingertip-light variety, but it has a beautiful precision and directness that makes threading the Phantom through corners superbly rewarding. It’s a disarmingly simple task to drive the car, too - there’s a long-ish travel accelerator to stir the 453bhp V12 engine, a beautifully progressive brake pedal to deal with the consequences, and a thin wand on the steering column to select forward, reverse or neutral. Ancillary controls are pretty much kept out of sight and, because so many functions are automated, out of mind.

It’s not an entirely silent ride, especially at higher ‘PH-optimised’ autoroute speeds, with a certain amount of wind and tyre-noise evident. But it’s never intrusive, and the levels are accentuated by the lack of mechanical noise more than anything. The 6.75-litre, 453bhp V12 is extremely well insulated from the cabin under most conditions, but when extended it becomes discreetly audible.

Under power the Phantom is not as surreally rapid as the new Rolls-Royce Ghost, which cracks off 60mph in 4.6secs, but because of its immense size the bigger car’s 5.7sec sprint is still enough to raise a giggle when you plunge the pedal deep into the sheepskin floormat. (Incidentally, those mats are so luxurious and soft it seems almost sacrilegious to wear shoes. In fact the Phantom’s entire interior is such a tactile delight that owners must sneak off to their garages at dead of night just to sit naked in their cars. Trust me, you would…) Keep your foot planted and the car relentlessly gathers pace, with 100mph arriving in fewer than 12secs on the way to a 150mph maximum.

As you might expect, it’s hard to imagine a more relaxing way to travel long distances, especially over lightly trafficked autoroutes, so it’s a sad irony that few Phantoms ever clock up serious mileage on ‘proper’ journeys like ours.

The truth is, if you can afford a car like this, the chances are that you can’t afford the time to spend a day driving it through Europe on a whim as we did. So most Phantoms spend their lives pottering around cities with hired drivers at the wheel, where it’s easy to forget that the car’s monumental presence is backed by the potential for equally monumental cross-country performance.

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soad

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