Audrey Fasquelle is laughing at me. She is one of the most gifted craftspeople I have ever seen, her hands delicately and apparently effortlessly painting with wood.
Not painting wood, painting with wood, for Fasquelle is a specialist in marquetry. Originally from Toulouse – and her gentle French accent seems to give her guffaws at my ham-fisted efforts an extra edge of delight – she has found herself on the south coast of England, at the Goodwood factory of one of the most famed and storied car brands of all time – Rolls-Royce.
Marquetry is the art of taking wafer-thin slices of wood veneer to create paintings. Fasquelle carefully selects and places the veneer and strategically darkens its colour using an ultra-pure silica sand sourced only from one place in France.
For one customer, keen to have his faithful golden retriever immortalised in the wood grain of his Rolls-Royce cabin, Fasquelle created a marquetry portrait of the hound, and you can see every single aspect of that dog’s character in his wood veneer eyes. It’s like a wooden photograph.
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My efforts – to create a simple outline of a horse in small slivers of ash atop walnut veneer – are fantastically simpler, and yet I’m still managing to make a total hames of it. Ah, well, at least I’m making Fasquelle laugh.
This squad of artisans range from long-serving Debra Clayton-Kyriakou, who creates fantastical pictures on leather, silk and bamboo cloth, to Isobel Morley, still finishing her apprenticeship, who paints on to the metal panels of the cars. She can create a kingfisher that you’d swear was about to flutter off the aluminium and dive into a nearby glass of water, and her paintings of dragons – popular with Rolls-Royce’s Asian customers – are so incredibly delicate that my 50-year-old eyes have to resort to a magnifying glass to see the finer points.
It’s not just Rolls-Royce reminding us that women can thrive and succeed in what has long been traditionally a man’s world of building and selling ultra-high-end motorcars (it’s always a motorcar when one speaks of Rolls-Royce, never merely a car...) but also a reminder of the incredible talents that are poured into these plutocratic carriages, often by people from humble backgrounds who have come into an apprenticeship programme straight out of school. Or like Clayton-Kyriakou, who lived for years in Athens working in the clothing industry, and returned to the UK to find that her incredible skills with a needle and thread were exactly what Rolls-Royce needed.
As a slice of propaganda, it’s kind of hard to beat. After all, it’s easy to get one’s back up, walking across the threshold of a factory where even the most affordable model tops €500,000, and that’s before Irish VRT and VAT.
It’s easy to invoke the spectre of a cost-of-living crisis and children living below the poverty line while the super-rich choose the precise tone of the leather seats they want.
But then you remember Audrey Fasquelle and Debra Clayton-Kyriakou and Isobel Morley. Or Allie Knight, who paints incredible landscapes on to wood – even creating perfect representations of the curved Karman Line, the thin barrier between the Earth’s atmosphere and the dark of space, for a special run of 62 cars (for the 62 miles, or 100km, that the Karman Line sits above our heads).
So perfect did Knight’s hand-painted line need to be, that she discovered that the jigs usually used to line up a Rolls-Royce’s dashboard panels during construction were actually not quite straight enough, so she and her colleagues had to create new techniques to achieve the perfect image.
Painstaking? Absolutely, but there’s something more than effort here. None of these craftspeople could hope to afford the cars that they help to create, yet each one of them, in a sense, owns it. Owns it in a way none of the “ultra-high net worth individuals” – as Rolls calls its minted customers; you may have a pithier epithet for them – really can. Sure, they can pay for the car, drive it around (or be driven around in it), but it was made by Allie, or Isobel, or Debra, or Audrey. They created it, so it’s theirs, really.
That’s the thought, at any rate, that I use to salve my own conscience once I’m chucked a set of keys and allowed out from the low-lying Goodwood factory (with its living grass roof a home to rare nesting bird species) in the new Spectre Black Badge.
The Spectre, you may recall, was Rolls’ first ever fully electric car, launched in 2022, just 120 years late. How so? Because Charles Rolls, one of the founders of the company, opined at the turn of the 20th century, that the inherent smoothness and quietness of an electric motor would actually be far better for a Rolls-Royce motorcar than any noisy, smelly, smoky combustion engine, if only someone could create a battery that could last long enough to make such a machine viable.
Well, someone has and not only that, but with the Black Badge, Rolls-Royce has gone even further. The regular Spectre coupe was hardly a shy, retiring violet of a car, what with four-wheel drive and 584hp, but the Black Badge, Rolls-Royce’s in-house (in-mansion?) high-performance sub brand, goes further still. Flick the little button on the steering wheel to awaken “Spirited” mode (no vulgar Sport mode for a Rolls) and you’ve unleashed 660hp. There’s even a launch control mode.
Just stand heavily on the brake pedal with your left foot, and equally heavily on the accelerator with your right. The adaptive air suspension deliberately shimmies and shakes a bit, just for the theatre of it, and then – whoosh – you’ve hit 100km/h in a silent, refined 4.2 seconds, in a manner more like Concorde on afterburner than a mere sports car.
It’s intoxicating stuff, but what I love about this Spectre Black Badge is the way it makes the whole Black Badge thing work in a way that the Ghost saloon and the Cullinan SUV can’t quite. Those cars become too thumpy and firm in their ride in Black Badge form – the Spectre remains smooth, with its air springs and constant-level “Planar” suspension shrugging off almost all road surfaces with distant aplomb.
It’s not a sports car. Fast, yes. Assured and capable, yes. But too distant for classical driver engagement. Instead, simply guide the light steering via the large, thin-rimmed wheel and allow the Spectre to get on with it. There’s an entertainment in that, in simply allowing a three-tonne motorcar (with me on board, anyway) to dance and swish like a machine half its size, helped by brilliant rear-wheel steering that allows the Spectre to turn as tightly as a hatchback.
Perfect, then? No, of course not. The brakes feel too soft for a car of such prodigious performance, and there’s a cheap-looking grey plastic shroud around the steering column, which is all too visible from the passenger’s seat. And then there’s the small matter of the price tag, which is likely to top €600,000 for anyone in Ireland looking to personally import.
But there’s no doubt in my mind that the Spectre is the best Black Badge model Rolls-Royce has yet made – effortlessly capable and glorious to drive. It might even be the best electric car, sorry motorcar, currently on sale, assuming price is no object. It’s vastly cooler than any Ferrari, and more exclusive than any Bentley.
It’s also Audrey’s car. And Allie’s. And Debra’s. And Isobel’s. And that makes it very special indeed.
