In all the furore about which German manufacturer will end up controlling Rolls-Royce Motor Cars, it is easy to forget that this spring has seen the introduction of the two new models which will take Rolls-Royce and Bentley into the 21st century.
Despite the almost incredible carry-on about the company's future, Rolls-Royce remains the ultimate luxury car brand name, and years of re-investment in Bentley have revitalised that historic sporting marque.
At the Geneva Show in March, the Rolls-Royce Silver Seraph was unveiled in a presentation which in other hands might have seemed completely over the top. But the first genuinely new Rolls-Royce model in almost two decades deserved a majestic introduction.
Handel's Let the Bright Seraphim was quite appropriate, although Aaron Copeland's Fanfare to the Common Man might have struck those who were standing fingering their wallets as rather optimistic.
While recent Rolls-Royce model changes have involved revisions to existing cars, this time the designers were going for something new. The scale, styling and engineering of the Seraph make sense in the late Nineties, while the interior is up to the usual lavish standards.
The Seraph project would have got nowhere without the collaboration between Rolls-Royce and BMW which allowed the new car to be powered by the Munich company's fine V12 engine, substantially reworked for this application.
Just seven weeks after the Geneva event, the Bentley Arnage was launched in the most appropriate location , the race circuit at Le Mans, so dominated by W O Bentley's cars in the vintage years. The new Bentley, effectively the sporting version of the Silver Seraph, takes its name from the corner at Arnage which has been a feature of the circuit since the 24-hour race was first run in 1923.
BMW contributed a quite different engine for the ''Arr-nazh'': a real powerhouse 4.4-litre four-cam V8, in this application with twin water-cooled turbochargers as developed by Cosworth Engineering.
It provides a peak power output of 350bhp matched with a massive torque figure of 413lb ft. And the Arnage handling has been tuned to attract the enthusiastic owner-drivers who have always been Bentley's target customers.
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