ROLLS-ROYCE SHOWS OFF ITS DARK SIDE
With Wraith Black Badge, the brand looks to shed its conservative image
You’ve made a deal with the devil. In the terms of this egregious contract you’ve offered the wicked one your soul, and in exchange he’s made you obscenely rich. Maybe the prince of darkness helped you achieve your wealth through art or music or some other way, but you are now a member of the ultra-high-net-worth pool — individuals whose financial assets exceed US$30 million.
But you’re not just outrageously wealthy; you are also 20- to 40-something young, a rulebreaker, a risk-taker, and you skirt the fringes of high society. You wear a Patek Philippe timepiece; when you dress to impress, you wear nothing less than a Fioravanti suit, otherwise your full-arm tattoos would belie your mass fortune. By Rolls-Royce’s standards, you are a disrupter and the antithesis of the company’s more conservative target market — well, except for the ultra-high-net-worth part.
Just for you, Rolls-Royce has created Black Badge, a nefarious blackout version of the Wraith (also available on the Ghost). It’s a made-to-order motor car built in response to some Rolls Royce cars that were customized by affluent young owners and observed by the company’s chief executive, Torsten Müller-Ötvös, while on a trip to the U.S. west coast.
When asked why they altered the appearance of these lowered, blacked-out cars, these owners claimed they just couldn’t be seen in two tonnes of gloss and chrome. However, according to Richard Carter, Rolls-Royce’s director of global communications, some of those cars were “hideous,” so they decided to perform that customizing in-house.
But Black Badge isn’t just an automobile coated in 16 layers of black so deep it devours light; this bespoke version of Rolls’ ultra-luxurious coupe also gets drivetrain, suspension and brake upgrades, unique 21-inch aluminum/carbon-fibre wheels, as well as distinctive interior touches that will no doubt cast a measure of loathing into the company’s current crop of senescent loyalists. But the Black Badge isn’t for traditional Rolls-Royce customers; it’s targeting uber-rich millennials.
Rolls-Royce invited us to test drive the Wraith Black Badge in the infernal summertime heat of sinful Las Vegas. The Wraith immediately asserts itself as an exclusive automobile the moment you open its rearward-swinging doors, but more so in Black Badge attire, especially with this bright blue leather interior trim. Although the contrasting hues might seem garish to some, the colour itself (several trim colours are available) was selected in homage to the recordbreaking Blue Bird vehicles of Sir Malcolm Campbell.
Unique to the Black Badge Wraith are high-gloss carbonfibre interior trim panels that have fine aluminum threads woven into them, and the metal interior trim has been darkened — not painted, but finished in lustrous black chrome. The headliner features Rolls’ starlight illumination, mimicking the night sky with tiny dots of light. And from the driver’s seat you’ll notice that the flying lady — the Spirit of Ecstasy — ahead of the bonnet is finished in high-gloss black chrome.
Rolls-Royce does a fine job of making the driving experience a very relaxing one, and this is emphasized by the controls, which are elegant yet remarkably simple. There’s no need to dazzle the driver with complex technology to perform simple tasks, so things such as the climate control switches are manual; you need not tax your brain filtering through layers of onscreen menus to adjust the temperature, just turn a knob and slide a lever.
The Black Badge is a higher-performance version of the Wraith, with larger brakes, a more responsive eight-speed automatic transmission and air suspension that is tuned for more engaging handling, though it’s not overdone. Its 6.6-litre V-12 claims the same 624 horsepower as in the Wraith, but peak torque is up by 52 pounds-feet, to a massive 642. The engine is silent and smooth, yet punch the throttle and you will sink deep into the driver’s seat.
This new-found performance was emphasized at the Goodwood Festival of Speed earlier this year, where a Wraith Black Badge posted a faster time on the hill climb than a Porsche 918 Spyder, and was only two onehundredths of a second off the time of a McLaren P1.
However, a late-evening session at the new Speed Vegas racetrack south of the city reveals that this isn’t a brash, loud, high-performance track car with turn signals; it’s a slightly firmer, slightly more responsive version of an ultra-luxury coupe that doesn’t compromise comfort in exchange for a sporty ride.
Initial throttle response is slightly more aggressive than in the Wraith, and the transmission is tuned to hold gears a little longer and to shift a little quicker — all subtle changes that don’t overwhelm the senses, which would be unbecoming of a Rolls Royce. If you’re looking for a tight steering, stiff-riding track-ready sports car that burbles and pops when you let off the gas, you’ll have to look elsewhere.
On the road, well, let’s just say that there’s a new personal benchmark to which all other ultra-luxury cars will be compared. The Wraith is the quietest, smoothest car I’ve ever driven, and it’s not even the quietest car in the Rolls-Royce lineup. Of course, this grandiose lavishness comes at a cost; the Wraith Black Badge starts at $399,000.
According to Carter, the number of ultra-high-net-worth individuals is growing by five to eight per cent a year, so he expects Rolls-Royce sales to grow by about the same percentage annually. He also expects that some of those customers will be new to the brand, enticed by this darker, more sinister Wraith. So if you’re one of those individuals who’s bound for an eternal, infernal afterlife, you should sign up for a Black Badge while you can.