This year, Rolls-Royce is celebrating the 110th anniversary of the inception of its goddess-like muse, the Spirit of Ecstasy.
The bronze sculpture of a woman in a gown that flows behind her like wings first officially adorned the front of a Rolls-Royce coach on Feb. 6, 1911. Subsequently molded in everything from 24-karat gold to frosted crystal, the figure has withstood more than a century beautifying Britain’s most prestigious luxury cars—even the more obscure ones such as the Rolls-Royce Camargue. More than anything, this car requires her to act as a badge to alerts the onlooker that this, too, is a Rolls-Royce, even if it isn’t quite as handsome as one might expect.
If you’ve not heard of the Camargue, don’t feel bad. I hadn’t heard of it until a friend recently started texting me photos of one he wanted to buy. (We each own Silver Shadows, so he knew he was in friendly company.) Heck, I didn’t even know how to pronounce Camargue.
“It is Kar-Marg—hard G,” a Rolls-Royce spokesperson told me when I asked. And re-asked. I am glad I did. Pronouncing it as “ca-MARJ” (or, even worse, “car-mo-GUE”) in a circle of discerning enthusiasts would be a humiliation I am unprepared to bear.
It’s important to note that my friend felt safe texting me these photos because, well, the Camargue is not regarded as the best-looking Rolls-Royce ever. “Worst. Car. Ever,” I recently overhead one gentleman declare to another on considering its merits.
Many have said that, at the very least, it is the worst-looking Rolls-Royce ever. Which is unexpected, considering it was designed by Pininfarina’s Paolo Martin. It has long, flat body lines across its sides, like a Volvo wagon from the 1990s, an over-elongated hood, and a roofline tilted at the rear at what can only be described as a neck-twisting angle chiropractors must love.
“It looks rather as though Farina has tried to bend the very handsome lines of his Fiat 130 Coupe design around an over-large Rolls-Royce radiator—and failed,” the editors of MotorSport Magazine wrote in a scathing review in 1975. “From the front, the overhang of the bodywork beyond the wheels reminds us of a rude photograph in the South African Grand Prix programme of the derriere of a very fat man astride a very small motorbike.”
Time hasn’t lessened the bile of the attacks. One 1981 Camargue listed for sale on Bring a Trailer as a “tweaked Pininfarina” earned comments describing it as “ghastly” and urging potential buyers to “bring a mallet.”
“This is a monument to wretched excess and belongs in the back of a RR museum in the section marked ‘Freaks and Mistakes,’” one commenter called Anscahuer opined—and got 310 likes in agreement. “Not usually vituperative, but this brings it out in me. Goes to show you no amount of makeup can make a pig look good.”
Johnathan Klinger, Hagerty’s vice president of car culture, put it rather more diplomatically: “Overall, we don’t receive many inquiries on the Camargue.”