Spirit of the Ghost: Taking a Rolls-Royce Wraith around France

Bog-standard navigation woes

The sat-nav is standard fare. We couldn’t get it to recognise the French village we were staying in, which is odd because other BMWs clearly do.

There are two things which mark the Wraith out as special. The first is control over the Spirit of Ecstasy bonnet mascot. You can power her up and down from a menu option. The second is amazingly high tech: infrared night vision. As with the other electronics, this is a high-end BMW option but it’s amazingly compulsive.

Again, this is BMW technology but this time it’s amazing. As you drive down a street of parked cars you can see which ones have been parked recently from their ethereal glow. More sensibly it spots people fantastically well. There some bloody clever image recognition which spots people and highlights them in yellow. As trickle-down technology goes, the heads up and infrared can’t come soon enough.

One warning we saw a few times in our marathon journey was a teapot. Spend too long at the wheel in a single day and the Wraith will suggest taking a break. It manages to be wonderfully English in an amusing way. But since we were rotating drivers in our thousand kilometre journey from Calais to St. Jean Cap Ferrat, and we were in supreme Rolls-Royce comfort, we ignored it.

A special Rolls-Royce touch is that there are umbrellas secreted in the door jambs. They are beautiful, but unfortunately too beautiful to get wet and we assumed that if we unfurled them we’d never get them back into their slots. A Phantom owner has told us that he keeps a couple of golfing umbrellas in the boot of his car for precisely this reason.

The wheels have 285-section tyres on 20-inch rims, and are beautiful, with the little trick mechanic that the logo swivels to always be the right way up.

So what’s it like to drive? Great. Although it’s best described by what it isn’t. One of the team eulogised the damping, and it really is magnificent. The bits that make that work are double-wishbone front suspension and multi-link rear with self-levelling, roll-cancelling air suspension and adaptive dampers. Here is a two and a half ton car which is amazingly comfortable but not soggy.

It’s not like some sporty saloons in that it shrinks around you as you press on; you are always aware of the size – particularly the width – but nor is it like driving an SUV where you make allowances for the bulk.

Another thing it isn’t is smug. Sometimes in big luxury saloons you feel “out of my way, I’m Mr Toad”. There is nothing caddish about the Wraith. Playboy? Perhaps, but you feel very comfortable in your skin when you drive it. That it’s deeply impressive but not intimidating is something we’d not encountered before.

The engine geeks looked at the engine and immediately started drawing comparisons to the 27 litre Merlin aero-engine of Supermarine Spitfire fame. At a mere 6.6 litres the Wraith's twin-turbo V12 produces 590lb ft and 624bhp, or about half the power of the Spitfire engine at a quarter of the capacity. Most of the time it is silent. Not “very quiet”, but so quiet that we several times pressed the start button to power it on and found that it had already been running and we’d just switched it off.

This isn’t just the amazing insulation of the car – which has twin bulkheads. Once we all climbed out and wondered why the car wouldn’t lock, to find that it was because we’d left it running.