You've Never Seen a Rolls-Royce Fly Like This Before

From Road & Track

Imagine poor Rolls-Royce at the Goodwood Festival of Speed. Surrounded by all those speed machines, with a competitor like Mercedes-AMG going all in for the crowd with the rocket that is the 577-horsepower Mercedes-AMG GT R. Rolls-Royce had to run something up the hill faster than a vintage Bentley. They are the local automaker, after all.

Back in the day, Goodwood's Lord March basically told BMW that it could have a piece of his land for the new Roll-Royce factory as long as the automaker dug a big enough hole for it (so that as not to ruin the view). Lord March himself drives a black Phantom Coupé with orange accents, but even his car can't be as dark as the Roller you see here, one of the new Black Badge models.

I believe it must have gone down something like this in the board room:

"Oh, so a regular Wraith can be hooned beyond belief across a wet field? Splendid!"

"Yeah, but we still need to do something about those damned Bentley Speeds, my friends. Go to the Nürburgring, because Brooklands turns out to be closed for some reason."

"So, we painted everything black, plus raised the torque to 641 lb.-ft. That should do it."

I guess it does.

Rolls-Royce Black Badge: Opulence, the fast way.