Push the chrome “S” button mounted on the steering wheel, and the Coupe is subtly transformed. The sport setting remaps the car’s electronics to give a sharper link between throttle and engine, and a slightly different gearbox tune to hold gears longer while accelerating, and downshift earlier while braking.
“Everything (on the Coupe) has been subtly overdone,” Matthew Bennett, the luxury marque’s Japan-based regional general manager, says. “It arrives at a lower gear than the other two cars, the engine’s a little further up the rev range, and the torque is a little more urgent in the way it comes in.” Use the throttle with a fair percentage of enthusiasm - instead of a tachometer, the Phantom uses a “power reserve” indicator that sweeps from 100-0% - and the Coupe instantly drops gears and the 6.75-litre V12 lets out a deep, barely audible growl.
With 338kW of power on tap, and a substantial 720Nm of torque, progress is quick, although moving the 2.6-tonne bulk dampens the effect. Even so, a 5.8-second sprint from 0-100km/h for that bulk is still respectable.
Not that owners look at the price. Bennett says many will also pick through the $20,000 to $30,000 items on the options list to customise their car.
“The cars that come into (Australia) are so different, so individual that it would be wrong for us to say this is the price of a car,” he says.
Anyway, next year we should see the fourth member of the Rolls-Royce family added to the line-up - a cheaper, “baby” four-seat saloon that should slip in at around $US250,000 depending on the state of the economy.
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