When it comes to custom cars, few brands can stick out their chests as much as Rolls-Royce: the Goodwood house has always made a cult out of the theme, becoming a benchmark in working with the client to find the vehicle that best suits them. represent. But now they went a step further and, according to his own words, for their last one-off they had to overcome the most complex technical challenges in their history. To the point that it took them four years to make it.
The car in question is the Rolls-Royce aPhantom Syntopi, the result of intense work by Bespoke, the most artisan division of the brand. It takes its name from a collection that the Dutch fashion designer Iris van Herpen presented in 2018, inspired by the shapes and patterns that can be found in nature, and it is precisely with her that they worked to achieve the goal.
The Phantom is one of the models associated with the Rolls-Royce tradition. Present since 1925 under that name in the brand’s catalogue, the current generation was launched in 2003. A good way to celebrate its 20th anniversary.
“For this special collaboration, I was inspired by the concept of ‘weaving water’ and transformed the feeling of being in motion into an immersive experience of fluidity inside the Rolls-Royce Phantom,” explained Van Herpen.
As he argued, “I wanted this to become a state-of-the-art experience being overwhelmed by the forces of nature,” as “the powerful movement of the Phantom is intertwined with the shifting three-dimensional waves inside the car to embody the ingenuity of nature.” .
Indeed, this concept is obvious as soon as the car doors are opened: the first thing that catches your eye is the roof, made from a single piece of leather, selected from over a thousand different options, and to which, in addition to 187 LED lights to emulate a starry sky, 162 cuts were applied by hand to give it a 3D sensation similar to the flow of a liquid.
That single finish, that of the roof, was one of the great objectives of the project, and it took the Van Herpen team some 300 hours of work in the Rolls-Royce workshop in Goodwood until it was as they imagined. A considerable percentage of the 700 hours that they invested in total for the cabin.
Around this idea converge luxury proposals for all the senses, starting with the upholstery of the seats, in leather, nylon and organza fabric, and even in the detail that the rear headrests were adapted to also fulfill the function of a dispenser perfume.
The presentation of a vehicle created with haute couture techniques required four years of work. The concept of “weaving water” is also present in the tabletop in the tables in the rear sector, for example, but particularly in the exterior, in the imposing wave design of the bonnet, a work by hand in which multiple layers of paint and varnish with glass particles that required four months of trial and error until calibrating the right proportion of each material.
Of course, the proposal fits perfectly with the finish chosen for the bodywork, baptized “Liquid Black” and created especially for this car: a metallic violet that, from a kind of iridescent effect, allows it to vary its hue and show itself lighter or darker depending on how light rays are reflected.
All this makes it an imposing vehicle, which also stands out for its measurements: based on the Rolls-Royce Phantom EWB, it is 6.91 meters long to complete a wheelbase of 3,772 millimeters, a detail that adds even more luxury and comfort to the proposal, especially to give greater display to the rear seats, the great stars of this type of vehicle.
But that does not mean that the mechanics do not matter, on the contrary: it rises to the occasion, and the Rolls-Royce Phantom Syntopia mounts a V12 engine –which says goodbye in this one-off– biturbo of 6.75 liters of displacement, which delivers about 571 HP of power to the rear axle at 5,000 rpm and 900 Nm of torque at 1,700 rpm from an 8-speed ZF automatic gearbox.
With this system, and despite the fact that the scale warns that it reaches 2,745 kilos, the car has the capacity to accelerate from 0 to 100 km/h in 5.5 seconds, and to easily touch the 250 km/h that its electronics imposed as a maximum speed limit.
“Once again we redraw the limits of innovation, craftsmanship and customization; not only for a car, but for the entire luxury sector in general”, outlined the Executive Director of Rolls-Royce Motor Cars, Torsten Müller-Ötvös, about this ambitious project, of which the brand preferred not to disclose its price nor the name of the client who challenged them to materialize it.
