Looking back over the decades, one has to ask what inspired Rolls-Royce to build a car as complex as the Phantom III, for this was the very first British car which had ever been designed around a V12 engine. Logically, however, one can see that Rolls-Royce had to compete with Hispano-Suiza, who also had a V12, and particularly with Cadillac, who were selling limited numbers of V16-engined machines. In the most discreet way, too, there must also have been a good marketing reason to supplement the efforts of the aircraft engine division, which had just started building the famous V12 Merlin engine, which would power the Spitfires, Hurricanes, Lancasters and Mosquitoes of the RAF in the Second World War.
As the successor of the existing company flagship, the Phantom II, the new Rolls-Royce was entitled Phantom III. Although no larger than before, it had a new chassis frame, complete with independent front suspension (which had been copied very carefully from the latest General Motors layouts), but all other mechanical attention was centred on the V12 engine. Not only was this a real leviathan, at 7.34 litres, but it also featured hydraulic tappets (‘valve lifters’, as Americans always called them), and was more powerful than any previous Rolls-Royce engine. |
 |
It needed to be, for the coachbuilt machines could be extremely heavy, and they carried such craggy bodywork with a vast frontal area that top speeds were rarely more than 90 mph.
Most owners, it has to be said, were far more interested in buying a car in which they could not even hear the engine running, and in which they could luxuriate in total comfort.
To their shame (though the news rarely got out at the time), Rolls-Royce found that these engines were trouble-some (particularly if the new tappets got sludge in their mechanisms), so there were no long-term plans to improve the power unit in the 1940s. The advent of war, and the post-war chance to start again, must have been a relief, although another consequence was that very few V12-engined Phantom IIIs survive into the classic car era. Only 710 were ever built.
The Rolls-Royce Phantom III – if one had to ask the price, one could probably not afford it, for these were the most exclusive and expensive of all late-1930s British motor cars.
|
