The third member of the Phantom family, the hard-topped coupe, has just arrived here, and last week Drive was invited to experience it.
The occasion is auspicious; not only do we have the new Phantom Coupe at our disposal, but also its two older siblings, the eloquent Drophead Coupe and the more stately four-door sedan that in 2003 reinvigorated the brand for its current owner, German luxury car maker BMW.
Each Phantom is distinctly different. The $915,000sedan (adding an extra 25cm to the wheelbase blows the price out to $1.095million) is stately, slab-fronted and grand in composure, and feels big on the road. It’s the only one of the cars we’re driving to miss out on the optional brushed steel bonnet gracing the other two cars.
There’s a very different feel to the $1.19million Drophead Coupe. It has a softer look than the sedan, falling gracefully at the front and rear. It’s the same length as its newer sibling and shorter than the sedan, but the feature teak deck, natural sisal floor mats and seamless leather seats give it a strong connection with the outdoors.
From the front, the $1.1million Phantom Coupe - ours is black with subtle red pinstripes - looks like a Drophead with a fixed roof. The join along the top of the windscreen almost gives the impression a hard-top has just dropped into place. In a way, it has. But it’s because the skin of the Coupe, from the top of the windscreen back, is formed from a single pressed sheet of metal, and the whole rear section is formed as one piece and then fixed to the car’s aluminium space frame.
The big doors allow Rolls-Royce to build an uninterrupted A-pillar into the Phantom that drops from the top of the windscreen right through to the floor. You notice how well it works in the Drophead Coupe, which doesn’t show any sign of the tell-tale scuttle shake of a poorly reinforced chassis.
However, that one-piece rear section makes the Coupe stand alone as the one car within the Phantom family with some real sporting potential. The Coupe sits on 21-inch tyres, providing a firmer ride. Underneath, there’s a stiffer stabiliser bar at the back, a slightly different spring set-up all around, and the steering feel is slightly heavier at speed, so the Coupe’s significantly thicker steering wheel loads up a lot earlier than that in the other two members of the Phantom family.
The Coupe’s brakes also have more progressive feel through the pedal compared with the deliberately soft feel given to the other two cars, which are more inclined to be used for around-town chauffeur work.
There’s also a touch of lairiness to the Coupe, with two exposed, chrome-tipped trapezoidal exhaust pipes hanging below the rear bumper. The other two Phantoms don’t dare show theirs.
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