Lot 448: 1926 Rolls-Royce Phantom I Pall Mall Tourer

As the number of cars increases which have undergone two or sometimes three major restorations in their lives and so have lost a good deal of their original identity, so the number of completely undisturbed 'barn finds', those cars which have survived decades behind the locked doors of hidden collections on out-of-the-way estates, steadily diminishes. We are delighted to be able to offer quite a remarkable Rolls-Royce Phantom I open tourer which has not been offered for sale in some five decades.The 40/50HP Silver Ghost was in production from 1907 to 1925 and was the model which established the claim of the Rolls-Royce to be 'the best car in the world'. Staggeringly smooth, swift and beautifully engineered for extraordinary levels of dependability, it was clearly going to be a tough act to follow for any model which succeeded it. Money and time were lacking for a completely new model, but a new engine was developed, with improved valvegear in a single cylinder head rather than the Edwardian model which had in effect two almost separate engines on a common crankcase. The new version produced an appreciable increase in horsepower, to increase top speed to around eighty miles per hour even with the enclosed coachwork which was becoming the norm, and the chassis was set up to take advantage of better handling, with the new wider tyres and the excellent servo-assisted brakes which had been introduced on the last Silver Ghosts. Rolls-Royce had set up a factory in 1920 in Springfield Massachusetts for the purpose of building cars whose avowed aim was to be "identical to, and interchangeable with" the British version. Of course one of the principal differences was that the Springfield cars were built, after the first few months, with left hand drive which hugely increased the appeal to US owner-drivers but there remained a small number of American customers who valued 'Englishness' over mere convenience and who continued to order their cars from Derby. There was almost universal agreement, however, as to the truly excellent quality of American coachbuilt bodies, from the elaborate limousines and town cars to the very rakish open tourers and roadsters. Chassis number 73DC is just such a car, built in 1926 at Derby with, of course, right hand drive, and in the space on its factory build sheet for the name of the intended client the car is recorded as being destined for Rolls-Royce Inc of North America. This probably meant either that the car embodied some recent modifications or chassis developments for consideration by the US branch, or as we have said, it could simply have been for a very conservative client. The coachwork selected was a superbly simple and timelessly elegant five-seat tourer, a very low-slung style known as the 'Pall Mall' (most US Custom Coachwork designs were given comfortingly British or European names to emphasise the marque's origins) but such bodies were built under licence by some half a dozen different coachbuilders and Brewster seems the most likely attribution for this example. It was fitted with an Auster screen to protect the rear passengers and the elaborate drum headlamps characteristic of the era. Little is known of the car's early history but by the late 1950s the car had passed into the collection of a gentleman in a remote area of Southern California; according to his son the intention was to give the car a through restoration but other projects supervened (the collection comprised some forty cars, mainly the finest American classics of the pre-war era) so that this car has survived some five decades in a virtual time-warp. We have found that the Phantom runs beautifully, with good oil pressure and uncommonly quiet valvegear, but obviously she will benefit greatly from correct recommissioning attention to all the other systems, such as braking and electrical prior to the serious long-distance use for which this delightful specimen is crying out. The main tub of the bodywork is polished in the manner of the celebrated Indian Maharajah cars and is in remarkable original condition. All four wings have been repainted in a manner to enhance the car's superb original aspect, without an inappropriately glossy look, to match the running boards which still show the correct finish now over eighty years old. The interior had moved beyond comfortable use, regrettable but has not been beautifully and sympathetically retrimmed in grey leather to the correct pattern.This is a very uncommon specimen, which will richly reward the attention paid to it in the form of a painstaking restoration to the most exacting standards.