London, England - With the imminent arrival of the Black Badge, the most extreme edition yet from Goodwood, Rolls-Royce has drawn up a list of some other extremes and oddities from the company’s history.
The Black Badge, introduced at the recent Geneva motor show, sees the Ghost and Wraith embellished with more power and dark metal detailing in place of shiny chrome, including the Spirit of Ecstasy ornament which has become “a high-gloss black vamp”.
PRECISE PINK
Rolls-Royce offers almost limitless possibilities for personalisation, allowing you to specify your car in whatever colour you like – even if it oversteps the bounds of good taste, like the customer who chose a red exterior and a bubblegum pink interior. It wasn’t just any red and pink, though, as the buyer brought in a t-shirt that he wanted to match the colours to.
SPECIAL OCCASION
When a customer does take delivery of their new car, it is far from being a simple hand over of the keys and the documents. Rolls-Royce makes sure it is an occasion to remember, and takes the new owner through every aspect of their car in a process that takes, on average, three hours.
FIND THE LADY
The Spirit of Ecstasy ornament, also known as the Flying Lady, is a finishing touch of elegance on the bonnet of every Rolls-Royce, but the mechanism that moves her up and down is anything but simple – there are as many as 24 unseen linkages and bearings that work together to tuck her out of sight.
STARS ABOVE
The Starlight Headliner, one the most popular bespoke features in a modern Rolls-Royce, comprises 1340 individually hand-woven fibre-optics in the interior roof. Customers are able to specify a specific constellation, which will be verified by a local observatory, and more than two kilometres of cabling is painstakingly hand-woven to achieve the eye-catching effect.
STARTING EARLY
What car did you drive in your early 20s? A Rolls-Royce might not be within reach for every 21-year-old, but that is the age of the youngest customer ever to have bought a car through Rolls-Royce London. It wasn’t just any car – it was the one-off Rolls-Royce Inspired by Film, which really brings the bespoke element of Rolls-Royce to life. Amazingly, this Rolls-Royce buyer isn’t the youngest anywhere in the world, though, as a buyer from Taiwan ordered his first Phantom at the age of just 12.
Star Motoring