Climb your way up cautiously, then pause for a moment, high above the old pit lane in the derelict, crumbling grandstand. In the occasional silences between the traffic bound for Reims, you can almost hear the ghosts whispering.

Just down the road from here, one of the brightest young stars of Ferrari, Luigi Musso, met his end in a savage crash 50 years ago. This was once among the fastest and most dangerous of all Grand Prix circuits. It has cut short other lives, too, in a similarly brutal fashion. Today, with racing long since abandoned on safety grounds, the former heart of the Reims Grand Prix complex is one of the stranger sights of France. The ruined grandstands line either side of the main road to Reims. The start-finish line where the chequered flag once fell is now passed dozens of times an hour by innocuous Renaults, Peugeots and Citroens.

Even the sudden materialisation of a stream of racing cars, however, could not have attracted much more neck-craning than the sight which met the road’s users on a sunny June day this year. Pulled up along the old pit wall were more than a dozen Rolls-Royces. And not any old Rolls-Royces. These were the all-new Phantom Coupé, about to go on sale for £296,500.

The sight was about to become more improbable yet. A mounting rumble grew into a roar of exhausts and up pitched what appeared to be half of Britain’s Bentley Drivers Club: supercharged “Blower” Bentleys, Green Labels – the cars of the late 1920s and 1930s whose feats at Le Mans made national heroes of the “Bentley Boys”.

Until Rolls-Royce was bought by BMW and Bentley by Volkswagen a decade ago, both were owned by the Vickers group and built on the same lines at Crewe. The reunion of the two great marques at this site of motor sport pilgrimage was marked by a token swig of champagne before our ways parted; the Bentleys to a rally in Italy, the Rolls-Royces to the serenity of Reims’ Chateau de Courcelles.

We had come from the Rolls-Royce factory on Lord March’s Goodwood estate, via Eurotunnel to Bethune, then Reims. The journey would continue to Troyes, Besancon and finally Geneva. Two days and 1,100km of everything from autoroutes to farm tracks leave few of a car’s foibles unrevealed. Indeed, if much of the raison d’etre for cars such as the Rolls-Royce is claimed to be continent-crossing ability in unmatched luxury, then crossing half a continent is not a bad way of putting such abilities to the test.

Rolls-Royce believes the Phantom Coupé to be the most capable driver’s car it has ever produced. And it comes with some hitherto un-Rolls-Royce-like engineering to prove it.

This Phantom has stiffer shock absorbers, springs and anti-roll bars, as well as a switch on the steering wheel which bears the inscription (good heavens!): “sport”. Choosing it does not provide any kind of fully manual gearbox option, but it does reprogramme the six-speed automatic gearbox to provide swifter take-offs and gear changes higher up the rev range. I wish I could tell you how far up, but in keeping with Rolls-Royce tradition, there is no rev counter, only a gauge saying what percentage of power is in reserve. There are no gear-lever options other than forward, reverse and neutral.

Up to a point, the execution matches the concept. Swift, silent, stable high-speed autoroute cruising can be taken for granted. And on open, sweeping and winding A-roads, the Coupé can be driven crisply, despite having steering a shade too low-geared. With 453 brake horsepower and 531lb/ft of torque it will also dispatch standstill to 60mph in 5.6 seconds.

Press on hard, however, as one might without a second thought in a much faster, four-wheel-drive Bentley Continental GT or Flying Spur, and the Coupé soon starts to express muted disapproval. Hustling down tight, rain-soaked mountain roads with their sharp corners into Geneva, the gearbox slows to decide on appropriate shifts, understeer sets in and the tyres begin to groan in protest. At well over two-and-a-half tonnes, it is still one of the heaviest cars on the planet. A sports car it is not.

Much better, then, to relax the driving style a bit and enjoy the Coupé’s many other virtues. The interior, as might be expected, is a visual symphony of polished veneers and painstakingly matched leathers. Car seats do not come more comfortable. The 15-speaker Lexicon Logic 7 audio system is like having your own portable concert and the “starlight” option, using fibre optics and pinholes in the fabric to provide a night sky ambience of adjustable brightness, is destined to be a must-have, even at £7,000. There is just one jarring note: an outmoded satnav system, lifted from the BMW range, has no place in such a car and is scheduled to be replaced.

As we drove into the Chateau de Courcelles I reflected that Napoleon would have been undyingly grateful for the use of a Phantom. It was at Courcelles in 1810 that he was due to meet, for the first time, his intended Austrian bride, Princess Marie-Louise. Two miles out of Courcelles a wheel fell off his carriage. He had to stomp the rest of the way in lashing rain, presumably prompting the good princess to wonder when two-cornered hats had become favoured headgear for large drowned rats. It wouldn’t have happened in a Roller.

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The details

The first Rolls-Royce with sporting pretensions. But how well does it work?

How much: £296,500 (plus options)
How fast: 0-60mph 5.6 secs, top speed 155mph (limited)
How thirsty: 18mpg on EU combined urban/rural test cycle
How green: 377g CO2 per km
Also consider: Bentley Brooklands £230,000; Maybach 57, £263,000; Bentley Continental GT Speed £137,500