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What did that reveal? Bonkers acceleration. Cue much groaning and much motorway driving in a convoy keeping an eye out for speed cameras. Except it rained the day we landed in Dubai and the approach to the road was washed out.
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It all makes for the sportiest Rolls-Royce ever, or as they like to put it “the most engaging.” Which is why we headed for the mountains on the border of the UAE and Oman, on a road that we drove a bunch of Maseratis last month and marvelled at the sparse traffic and even sparser speed cameras. If you’re joining a motorway it will select a lower gear, putting you in the meat of the torque curve saving you the jolt of kicking down. So for instance if a corner is coming up, the gearbox will hold on to the gear and not upshift. The transmission also retains the novel feature where it reads the road via the sat-nav and selects an appropriate gear. There’s also a more assertive pull away, taking away the deliberate delay built into the standard Wraith’s response, a legacy of chauffeur-centric setups. The Low mode also calls up a more aggressive (read sporty) shift logic while the new performance-focussed throttle mapping takes engine revs all the way up to 6000rpm if the accelerator is depressed more than 80 per cent. To handle the extra torque the 8-speed ZF transmission has been bolstered with stronger clutches and in keeping with the sportier intent it hangs on to gears longer and changes ratios quicker. Before that though, the numbers The Wraith retains the ginormous, twin-turbocharged 6.6-litre V12 and the power remains the same at a mighty 624bhp but the torque goes up by 70Nm to an incredible 870Nm.