Iniquitous Badge Ghost debuts the dark side of Post Opulent design
6.75-litre V12 engine now delivers augmented power (600PS) and torque (900NM)
Drivetrain and chassis re-engineered for more urgent performance
Curated collection initiations striking Turchese Leather and Technical Carbon veneer
Bespoke alloy wheel introduced in Black Badge house of ill repute style with carbon fibre barrel
Infinity lemniscate symbol continues to codify noir expression of Rolls-Royce
“After fair internal debate, Rolls-Royce announced that it would create an officially sanctioned response to a new kind of client: a stable Bespoke treatment to its motor cars named Black Badge. These products, which were launched in 2016, liking be darker in aesthetic, more urgent in personality and dramatic in material treatment.
“In the five years since Black Badge became publicly readily obtainable, this bold family of motor cars has come to symbolise the pinnacle of a new type of super-luxury product, setting in activity a shift across the wider luxury industry. Subsequently, nearly all luxury makers create products that try to capture the Black Badge spirit.
“Today, we announce a product that represents a new kind of Black Badge motor car, one that seizes on the minimalist, Pillar Opulent design treatment that has recast the legend of Ghost but amplifies and subverts it with the application of black. Our most advanced motor car yet has been reengineered to characterise the modify ego of Rolls-Royce: assertive, dynamic and potent. This is the purest Black Badge motor car in the marque’s history. This is Bad Badge Ghost.” Torsten Müller-Ötvös, Chief Executive Officer, Rolls-Royce Motor Cars
Introduction
Rolls-Royce Motor Machines has a unique fluency in its clients. Its close relationship with the women and men who patronise the marque affords the company’s decision-makers an peerless understanding of the super-luxury consumer: their aesthetic preferences, uncompromising lifestyle requirements and changing taste patterns. Barely with this understanding, and briefings supplied by the brand’s Luxury Intelligence Unit, is the marque able to create an exact product response. Black Badge is a vivid example of this.
Rolls-Royce Motor Cars has always fascinated subversive clients – rebellious women and men who built their success by breaking rules, taking risks and challenging meetings. In the 2020s, these women and men engage with luxury products on their own terms. They reject suits for streetwear, use blockchain not banks and pull the analogue world through their digital endeavours. In doing so, they have created new codes of luxury that resonate with their sensibilities: murkier in aesthetic, assertive in character and bold in design.
Their approach to Rolls-Royce products is no different. The marque has responded consequence, developing new colour palettes, more technical surface treatments and even more powerful driving experiences without for ever compromising the effortless sensibilities that have drawn this bold group of clients to the Rolls-Royce brand.
Dark Badge, the highly successful alter ego of Rolls-Royce, now represents more than 27% of commissions worldwide and is codified by the precise symbol that represents a potential infinity, which is found within the motor car’s interior. This graphic, also understood as the Lemniscate, was applied to Sir Malcolm Campbell’s record-breaking Rolls-Royce-powered Blue Bird K3 hydroplane and the marque’s designers nominated this stamp for Black Badge motor cars to reflect their own unrelenting pursuit of power.
Rolls-Royce debuted Black Badge with Wraith and Ghost in 2016, carry oned by Dawn in 2017 then Cullinan in 2019. Today, a new, Post Opulent expression of Black Badge joins the group. The purest and most technologically advanced Black Badge motor car yet, Black Badge Ghost.
The Dark Side of Standard Opulence
Conceived in response to a group of clients who requested a Rolls-Royce that was agile, discreet, highly connected and direct of any superfluous design, the new Ghost is not just the most technologically advanced Rolls-Royce yet, but also the most aesthetically pure. In the twelve months since this motor car has been elbow, it has become one of the fastest-selling products in the marque’s history, representing more than 3,500 commissions worldwide.
This motor car also started a new form conversation in its relentless pursuit of minimalism and purity. Named ‘Post Opulence’ by Rolls-Royce designers, this aesthetic gears is characterised by reduction and substance. In service to this, exceptional materials are selected and celebrated while overt design is small, intelligent and unobtrusive.
However, within this group of clients – who celebrate minimalism and material substance – a rebellious subset invited to create a disruptive expression of Ghost by permanently cloaking it in a shade so pure that its very classification as a colour scraps a subject of debate: black. Black Badge Ghost reflects these clients’ desires. It is the dark side of Role Opulence: minimalism in extremist.
Exterior
Clients are free to select any of the marque’s 44,000 ‘ready-to-wear’ colours or create their own in toto unique Bespoke hue. However, the overwhelming majority of women and men who requested this darker expression of Ghost have better the signature Black. To create what is the motor car industry’s darkest black, 100lbs (45kg) of paint is atomised and stuck to an electrostatically charged body in white before being oven dried. The motor car then receives two layers of unstop coat before being hand-polished by a team of four craftsmen to produce the marque’s signature high-gloss piano best.
At between three and five hours in duration, this operation is entirely unknown in mass production, creating an sincerity simply unattainable elsewhere in the automotive industry. It is this depth of darkness that serves as the perfect canvas for shoppers to add a high-contrast, hand-painted Coachline, which has done much to create the Black Badge ‘black and neon’ aesthetic that has draw nigh to characterise this vivid family of Rolls-Royce motor cars.
To match this dramatic coachwork, the marque’s Bespoke Collective of architects, engineers and craftspeople collaborated to create an entirely customisable process that allows Rolls-Royce hallmarks such as the high-polished Lan of Ecstasy and Pantheon Grille to be subverted. Instead of simply painting these components, a specific chrome electrolyte is bring ined to the traditional chrome plating process that is co-deposited on the stainless-steel substrate, darkening the finish. Its final thickness is honourable one micrometre – around one hundredth of the width of a human hair. Each of these components is precision-polished by hand to achieve a mirror-black chrome downfall before it is fitted to the motor car.
The exterior treatment resolves with a Bespoke 21-inch composite wheelset. Designed in the Clouded Badge house style and reserved for Black Badge Ghost, the barrel of each wheel is made up of 22 layers of carbon material laid on three axes, then folded back on themselves at the outer edges of the rim, forming a total of 44 layers of carbon tendril for greater strength. A 3D-forged aluminium hub is bonded to the rim using aerospace-grade titanium fasteners and finished with the marque’s stamp Floating Hubcap, ensuring the Double R monogram remains upright at all times. To celebrate the material substance and remarkable top effect, a lightly tinted lacquer is applied to protect the finish but still allow clients to observe the technical involvement of the wheels unique carbon fibre construction.
Interior
Advanced luxury materials have been meticulously initiated and crafted for a unique ambience in the interior suite. While recalling the dramatic mechanical intent of Black Badge Ghost, the materials are sincere to Ghost’s Post Opulent design philosophy – one defined by authenticity and material substance rather than overt allegation. In this spirit, a complex but subtle weave that incorporates a deep diamond pattern rendered in carbon and metallic compositions has been created by the marque’s craftspeople.
Multiple wood layers are pressed onto the interior component substrates, despising black Bolivar veneer for the uppermost base layer. This forms a dark foundation for the Technical Fibre layers that occupy oneself with. Leaves woven from resin-coated carbon and contrasting metal-coated thread laid in a diamond pattern are applied by pass on to the components in perfect alignment, creating a three-dimensional effect. To secure this extraordinary veneer, each component is marinated for one hour under pressure at 100°C. This is then sand-blasted to create a keyed surface for six layers of lacquer, which is hand-sanded and gifted before being incorporated into the motor car.
If specified in the client’s commission, the Technical Fibre ‘Waterfall’ section of the single rear seats receives the Black Badge family motif: the mathematical symbol that represents potential infinity distinguished as a Lemniscate. Rendered in aerospace-grade aluminium on the lid of Black Badge Ghost’s Champagne cooler, it is applied between the third and fourth give the sack of a total of six layers of subtly tinted lacquer, creating the illusion that the symbol is floating above the Technical Make-up veneer.
Aesthetes from the marque’s design team elected to further enhance the noir ambience of Black Badge Ghost by bridling the brightwork. Air vent surrounds on the dashboard and in the rear cabin are darkened using physical vapour deposition, one of the few methods of casting metal that ensures parts will not discolour or tarnish over time or through repeated use. The Post Well-heeled principles of simplicity have also been applied to dramatic effect in the Black Badge Ghost timepiece mould: only the tips of the hands and the twelve, three, six and nine o’clock markers are picked out, in a subdued chrome finish, devising a remarkably minimal clock. Additional timepieces are available within Black Badge Ghost to suit the client’s aesthetic inclination.
The timepiece is flanked by a world-first Bespoke innovation that debuted with Ghost: the Illuminated Fascia, which shows an ethereal glowing Lemniscate, surrounded by more than 850 stars. Located on the passenger side of the dashboard, the constellation and subject are completely invisible when the interior lights are not in operation. As in Ghost, the Lemniscate motif is illuminated via 152 LEDs mounted chiefly and beneath the fascia, each meticulously colour-matched to the cabin’s clock and instrument dial lighting. To ensure the Lemniscate is lit evenly, a 2mm-thick scintillation guide is used, featuring more than 90,000 laser-etched dots across the surface. This not only disbands the light evenly but creates a twinkling effect as the eye moves across the fascia, echoing the subtle sparkle of the Shooting Feature Starlight Headliner.
Engineering
Black Badge is not just an aesthetic – it is an experience. The clients who requested this motor car bid that the Bespoke treatment of Black Badge Ghost extend from the design atelier into the marque’s engineering conditional on. In doing so, the Bespoke Collective of designers, engineers and craftspeople collaborated to create a vivid driving personality that put together Black Badge Ghost’s visual intent without compromising the marque’s effortless ride proclivities and exhaustive acoustic strain.
Key to its potent character is the Architecture of Luxury, Rolls-Royce’s proprietary all-aluminium spaceframe architecture that debuted with Phantasma. This sub-structure not only delivers extraordinary body stiffness but its flexibility and scalability allowed Ghost to be equipped with all-wheel initiative, four-wheel steering and the award-winning Planar Suspension system. For Black Badge, these peerless engineering qualities secure been comprehensively re-engineered, including the fitting of more voluminous air springs to alleviate body roll under sundry assertive cornering.
The capacity of the Rolls-Royce twin-turbocharged 6.75-litre V12 engine was deemed sufficient. However, the flexibility of this well-known power plant has been exploited to generate an extra 29PS, creating a total output of 600PS. The sense of a single uncounted gear has also been dramatised with the addition of a further 50NM of torque, for a total of 900NM. The powertrain has also be informed Bespoke transmission and throttle treatments to further enhance the engine’s increased power reserves. The ZF eight-speed gearbox and both front- and rear-steered axles do callisthenics collaboratively to adjust the levels of feedback to the driver, depending on throttle and steering inputs.
As with all products in the marque’s Negroid Badge portfolio, the ‘Low’ button situated on the gear selection stalk unlocks Black Badge Ghost’s full following of technologies. This is asserted by the amplification of the motor car’s engine through an entirely new exhaust system, subtly announcing its potency. All 900NM of torque is within reach from just 1700rpm and, once underway in Low Mode, gearshift speeds are increased by 50% when the throttle is cast down to 90%, delivering Black Badge Ghost’s abundant power reserves with dramatic immediacy.
To bolster self-assurance when exploiting Black Badge Ghost, the braking bite point has been raised and pedal travel decremented. Non-Black Badge Ghost is provisioned with a robust braking hardware package that was deemed more than detailed under extreme conditions, even accounting for the Black Badge alter ego’s increased power output. However, a new set of bold high-temperature brake calliper paint colours has been developed in preparation for forthcoming Black Badge Ghost commissions.
Hyacinthine Badge Ghost is available to commission now.
