Lot 334: 1926 Rolls-Royce Phantom I Pall Mall Open 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 Rolls-Royce claim to be producer of "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. The commercial reality which faced the Rolls-Royce company in the mid-'20s, however, was that the 'Ghost was losing ground in terms of its outright performance to more modern rivals such as the Hispano Suiza and, in the crucial American market, Packard and Duesenberg. Money and time were lacking for a completely new model, but a new engine was developed with more modern valve gear 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, raising 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 America 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 American 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 73 DC 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 American 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 American 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 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. 73 DC came on test on 13th April 1926 and was dispatched two days later, to arrive in New York eleven days later on board the SS Celtic. The build sheet specifies a folding luggage grid and an AT speedometer, both of which are still fitted to the car. By the late 1950s the car had passed into the collection of a gentleman in Southern California named Montigel; according to his son the intention was to give the car a thorough 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 car runs beautifully, with good oil pressure and uncommonly quiet valve gear, but obviously the car will benefit greatly from re-commissioning attention to all its other systems, such as braking, cooling, and electrical components prior to serious use. The main tub of the body at some point was polished in the manner of the celebrated Indian Maharajah cars which created a very dashing impression. The next owner might want to continue this theme, leaving only the wings to be painted. 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.