A weekend in a Rolls-Royce Dawn

When you’re offered a Rolls-Royce for a few days, you tend to clear your plans. Then immediately study a map to see how many miles you can feasibly drive in your allotted time.

Well, you do if you’re anything like me. With a £331,500 Dawn (as specced) mine over the weekend before Christmas, I put on hold any festive merriment and looked at how far away from congested London I could get, in order to photograph the car in the meagre hours of daylight mid-December offers.

The result was an utterly splendid day in the Peak District, and as well as the shots in this gallery, you can have a look at Adam Shorrock’s full shoot in our Rolls-Royce Dawn review.

All the sensible road-testy stuff is there, too. But here are a few other thoughts I gathered during my time with the Dawn. Because when you use a car for several days, it ends up being drawn into some unavoidable errands, too. How does a car worth a third of a million pounds cope with the normal stuff?

Pictures: Adam Shorrock/author

Here it is in the Top Gear park, the sight that greets me as my Friday comes to a close. This is a job I’ve done for close to nine years, and driving nice cars has gained a degree of normality in that time.

But only a degree. Rest assured that everything, from the phone call offering the car, to the email confirming its booking, to its arrival in the car park, has been tremendously exciting. Walking towards a car like this when it’s yours for a few days is a situation I expect will never, ever get tiresome.

And here it is around 16 hours later, with around 200 miles on its trip meter having driven to the Peak District’s Snake Pass via Lincolnshire, to pick up Adam.

The first few hours with the Dawn were a tad tense, I’ll admit. It’s pretty large and, with the bonnet’s extreme corners dropping out of your vision, it feels even larger when you're threading it through traffic.

Leaving London in Friday evening traffic is an experience fraught enough to cancel out the Rolls’ zen-like calm inside, then. But it’s merely a matter of getting used to the car you’re in command of. Flick the wing mirrors down so you can be sure you’re tucked between the white lines and, such is their size, you’ll still see right behind the car, too.

Bringing it to an area with larger roads and even larger scenery seems perfect, then. The Lake District or western Scotland might have been better, but those are probably a bit of a stretch, particularly when useful daylight only arrives between 9am and 3pm at this time of year.

The Peaks are nearly as pretty though, and with the Snake Pass infamously vulnerable to bad weather, it was reasonably quiet the week before Christmas. Quiet enough to both enjoy the car and get some photography of it without distupting anybody’s day, at least.

Predictably, the Dawn feels happiest driven placidly, with its ‘Power Reserve’ meter – Rolls’ choice in place of an uncouth rev-counter – indicating just a few per cent of its 563bhp is being used. With literally no engine noise and an extremely cocooning ride, you could drive like this for days before feeling the least bit fatigued.

Bruce McLaren once described switching from racing single seaters to saloon cars as like “watching a silent movie” in comparison, so desensitised was the experience. The same seem­s true climbing into a Rolls from a ‘normal’ car.

Yet it’s jolly good fun to hustle the car along, too. I enjoy reading books about the beginnings of motorsport in the early 1900s, when cars were called things like ‘Blitzen’ and had ginormous 21-litre engines up front powering ludicrously skinny wheels at the back.

Naturally, this is as sophisticated as its additional 110 years over cars like those suggests. But the big, heavy V12 ahead of you calls for a certain driving style to get the most speed from the Dawn, and it’s fun to imagine you’re piloting one of those scary, overengined beasts.

You need to turn into corners nice and slowly, but once the car is tucked into the corner, you can use a very indulgent amount of throttle to make it squat down so you can power yourself away up the next straight. This all happens with next to no feel from the steering wheel, but with plenty of grip beneath you.

But while most modern performance and luxury cars allow you to hop in and drive wantonly and unwisely quickly without much consideration, the Dawn demands some thought and plenty of your attention. I really, really like that about it.

There are so many facets to the Dawn beyond how it drives, of course. The interior could have a whole book written about it.

It goes without saying the materials are terrific. Nigh on every surface is covered in leather (Mugello Red, in this case) or wood (Tudor Oak), and both are many cuts above equivalent materials in more sanely priced luxury cars. The carpets are deep enough to lose your phone and keys in, I imagine.

Perhaps my favourite thing, though, is the various warning bongs if you’ve left your lights on, a passenger needs their seatbelt, and so on. They are not bongs, but perfectly played notes on string instruments I’m not cultured or sophisticated enough to identify. They relay vital and urgent information without breaking the calm inside. Wonderful.

You’ll notice the weather is a bit misty here. It’s as cold and dank as it looks, and yet I spent as much time as was realistic with the roof down. Below 50mph it’s absolutely fine inside, with very effective air con and heated seats that threaten to sear the bum of your jeans even on their lightest setting.

Above 50mph and the sheer size of the interior means it gets a bit blustery inside. It’s not like being cocooned inside a little MX-5 or suchlike. But that’s no issue: slow down to 30mph and you can fold the roof up or down while still on the move.

They say it takes 20 seconds; it feels like longer in reality, but you can forgive the Dawn when you consider simply how much fabric (Deep Red, in this instance) there is to unfurl.

I like the Peak District. I like the north in general, in fact. I’m from there. But having shot a number of pricey vehicles in the Peaks, Lakes and Yorkshire Moors in the past, you do often encounter a slightly “how much money?!” attitude. They can be viewed as unnecessary and brash.

Not so the Rolls. Stopping to buy a £1.50 cup of tea proves an entirely pleasant experience, and the lady behind the counter asks lots of questions about the car, though she’d easily identified it as a Rolls before our chat. None involve cost; most involve “is it lovely?”

Mind, when another customer strides up and asks who I’ve borrowed the Dawn from, perhaps it’s clear from my appearance that I’m several hundred thousand cups of tea from being able to actually afford it.

After the sun has finally dipped and Adam and I need to head back south, we stop for another cup of tea to keep us fresh. We pull into a pub car park and the owner immediately draws some fencing across the entrance, as I fill the final empty space with 5.3 metres and 2.5 tonnes of Rolls.

“Sorry, have I parked in the wrong place?” I ask, sensing he doesn’t normally close the car park off. “The pub’s shut for a private function,” he responds, “but YOU can come in. And this way no one else can get in near the car.”

I have never had such a welcoming response to a car that’s worth more than my house. Is it because Rolls is British? Is it because its cars pervade class where a similarly priced Ferrari would not? Tell me what you think below. All I know is that the bill for two cups of tea and a packet of crisps probably equates to a smaller spend than he expected when he graciously let us crash a Christmas party.

The other theory is that he felt so sorry for me after the lengthiness of my parking move, it would have been cruel to immediately turn Adam and I away.

It is not the work of a moment to park a Dawn, with copious bodywork in every direction, huge 21in polished wheels just waiting to be kerbed and parking sensors which are polite, rather than urgent.

This camera view helps, mind: it’s hardly new, and Nissans have had similar tech for years. But on the Dawn’s large infotainment screen the display is easy to decipher and it’s brilliant for making sure you’re a safe distance from the kerb.

It also assists you in ensuring there’ll be enough space to swing open your rear-hinged door. The doors themselves are works of art, particularly on the inside, and you can open them anywhere between around ten and nearly 90 degrees. But until you’re accustomed to getting in and out backwards, it’s all too easy to look a bit clumsy.

And while the full experience involves the door at its widest angle, as you and your passenger casually stroll into the car like it’s a posh hotel before swinging the door electronically shut with a button, the reality is that never actually happens. Most of the time, a wall or other cars simply get in the way of such caddishness. Shame.

For a car so large, its interior doesn’t feel cavernous. There is more than enough room for four adults – it’s one of very few convertibles on sale to genuinely claim that – and even with the roof up, I can’t imagine anyone in the back struggling for headroom. I’m five foot nine, so I can’t conclusively say. Yet it’s all a touch cosier than the outside proportions might suggest.

And while the boot is long, it’s quite shallow. Seemingly, its space is eaten into by the necessities of the roof mechanism. Rolls can always sell you a Wraith if that’s making you falter over the order form.

I can confirm there’s more than enough room for Max, however, meaning he can be chauffeured to his Christmas party in maximum style. Looks like he’d rather be driving, though.

The reckoning, after 547 miles in the Dawn, is 19.4mpg. Rolls-Royce claims 20mpg, making this the closest I’ve got to matching an official fuel economy figure in quite some time.

Alright, this will be of minor importance for most Dawn owners. But a combination of quick driving in the Peak District, a couple of hours in London congestion, and many hours with the roof down and the heater working overtime really ought to have been more taxing. The Dawn getting so close to its efficiency claims is seriously impressive.

In fact, the whole car is seriously impressive. I’d not driven a Rolls-Royce before the Dawn was delivered, and I figured it would be an extremely enjoyable diversion; a weekend in something large, soft and plush that might also put into context why I enjoy light, scrappy sports cars and hot hatches so much.

And yet the Dawn slipped effortlessly into every occasion it was presented with, and its extreme class and abundant character never failed to make me smile. Even a three-hour slog in the A1 becomes eventful when there’s a twin-turbo V12 up front and the Spirit of Ecstasy bisecting your view forwards. It also led to more conversations with admiring strangers than any car I’ve ever tested.

I expected to like the Dawn. I wasn’t wrong. But what I hadn’t expected is that it would feel so indispensable by the time it was taken away. A weekend quickly become too fleeting, and it’s left a large hole outside my flat. Quite literally.