There are certain things a Rolls-Royce Phantom is supposed to do. Like purring down the tarmac at parade speeds, blasting across the continent to keep up with the owner’s Gulfstream, making a grand entry to be welcomed by flashlights and so on. Trust me, the last thing the engineer who signed off this particular Phantom would have had in mind was a motoring journalist slaloming through a set of orange traffic cones.
But we had to do just that. Well, the brief was to treat the world’s best motorcar like any other road test machine. So we wanted to know how it tackles suburban traffic, how it behaves in bumper-to-bumper metro traffic, how it sucks in air and creates a vacuum on an Expressway, how it behaves on our favourite mountain road, and well... how it behaves in our very own Performance Evaluation Track (PET) test.
If you will allow me a modicum of chest thumping, we were qualified to do all of the above since it was not the first Phantom that we were driving. Actually, we have featured close to half a dozen Rolls-Royces in these pages over the last eight years. And we even drove the new Phantom for our sixth anniversary issue. But to test one was a dream come true. Get ready to stretch your imagination.
Eyeful
The Phantom is a big automobile. This, the standard wheelbase version that we tested, is close to six metres long, almost two metres wide and over one and a half metres tall. And it weighs more than three tonnes. Of course it shows. It is the size of a small grocery store in Mumbai minus the colourful packets of Lays dangling from above. And it is far more impressive. I never liked the square headlamp treatment, but in the sum of things, the Phantom can drop some jaws. Park one on the road and admire it from the front-three quarter for best results.
The design brief given to Ian Cameron, chief designer of Rolls-Royce (what an entry in your CV that makes!), was to create a motorcar that is clearly a Rolls-Royce even when the radiator grille is not in view – and I have to say he has exceeded the brief with the Phantom. Though designed for the new millennium, the Phantom has design cues from almost every great Rolls-Royce in the past – the Parthenon grille, short overhangs at the front, long overhangs at the rear and a well tucked-in rear section.
You will be surprised to know that one of the functions of the rear hinged doors is to form a protective barrier to those entering or leaving the car when both doors are open.
|
