It seems prudent to first provide a background to the launch of R-R’s most ambitious car and the subject of this article, the Phantom III in 1936. 

The Silver Ghost was announced in 1906 to widespread acclaim, it was a marvellous car, it gave R-R a reputation for making the best car in the World and production continued until 1926, four-wheel brakes arriving only slightly earlier and with beaded edge tyres practically till the end. It really was overdue for replacement but the introduction of a new, large capacity model had been delayed by the need to design and develop the 20HP that appeared in 1922. 

There were three pre-war Phantoms, the first was known as the New Phantom and was really just a Silver Ghost chassis with a more powerful overhead valve engine of 7668cc. It arrived with the new “balloon tyres” in well-based rims as we use now. Sadly the old chassis was too tall for then modern designs of coachwork, the steering (with the later tyres) was heavy and handling a little ponderous and, because the new bodies were heavier, it was marginally slower than its predecessor. The company realised this and quickly began work on its successor the Phantom II. Announced in ’29 this model had a lower and more modern chassis (much influenced by one in the 20) and a more powerful version of the P1 engine with a cross-flow cylinder head. It was available with two chassis lengths, the shorter was intended to improve R-R’s sporting credentials and so, after a few had been made and sold, the Continental appeared at the 1930 Motor Show. Its chassis number was 26EX, it was recently restored by Alpine Eagle and appeared at Althorpe for the 1997 RREC Annual Rally where it won a first in class. It was in the same striking Saxe blue and pale pearlescant blue as it had been sold in when new. In 1930 these paints were unheard of, cellulose had only justly appeared, so a process for producing imitation pearls by grinding up fish scales and mixing them into clear lacquer was adapted so that it could be sprayed over the base colour to give an impression of great depth. 

The Phantom II was an excellent and extremely durable car and, in Continental form, perhaps the most desirable R-R of those made before the war, but it rapidly became out of date. It was not helped by the rather staid and unimaginative offerings of the UK coachbuilders either, the fact was that Paris and the US produced a much greater proportion of truly elegant cars. 

Despite the Wall St. crash of ’29, the American auto industry was offering a wide variety of exceptionally good cars by the early thirties; quite a few could claim to be better and much less expensive than the Phantom II. Cadillac had a cooking V8, and luxury V12’s and V16’s, Packard straight eights and V12’s, Chrysler straight eights, Duesenberg a twin OHC four valves per cylinder straight eight with optional supercharger and so on. In Europe it was no easier for Rolls-Royce, Hispano Suiza had a magnificent 6.6L straight six and a 9.5L V12, Bugatti was making a 12.7L straight eight called the Royale that was only available to you if you were good enough. Allegedly a Chicago meat packer wasn’t and didn’t get one. Had Ettore relented it would have amounted to a 25% increase in overall sales! It is hard now to imagine the arrogance that surrounded the sale of these extraordinary cars. Horch and Maybach (allegedly more complex than a PIII) in Germany were working on V12s as well. By comparison Rolls-Royce was too expensive and rather out of date! 

We should remember that first and foremost Rolls-Royce were aero engine makers predominantly supplying the Ministry of Defence. They had provided engines for the first plane to cross the Atlantic in 1920 and for the later Schneider trophy seaplanes to travel faster than any other, but by the mid thirties, car production was a mere six percent of turnover and it was losing them money. The Government was as inept at constraining costs or preventing delays to military contracts, as R-R was of understanding their importance to commercial car production. This was a period of austerity and it caused many luxury carmakers trouble by WWII but despite this precarious situation R-R began to develop a new model that would set new standards and that they hoped would return them to the forefront of automobile technology. Market research was not included in the experiment nor any consideration given of service requirements other than those the company could provide. In modern parlance the bean counters were on Planet Zog, the Government were paying the bill and they had a clear run ahead! 

So it was that in 1936 Rolls-Royce introduced a truly remarkable car, one the like of which we shall never see again, the magnificent Phantom III. 

Technical description 

Unlike its predecessors the PIII had independent front suspension and this requires a completely different chassis as it has to have tremendous lateral stiffness that is achieved by cruciform bracing. A massive U channel X shape is inserted immediately behind the engine with its intersection points where the propshaft connects to the gearbox. Then across the front under the radiator there is another strong brace with the suspension on each end. In America, it would have been welded, and by another company at least riveted, but by R-R held it together with a mass of specially made ¼” BSF nuts and bolts! And this trend is carried through the whole chassis; it is wonderfully made to the highest possible standards and without any consideration for cost. The Independent suspension is licensed from GM but built to R-R standards with the coil springs and the shock absorbers encased in malleable iron castings and oil filled. Every linkage bellcrank, fastener or any part at all, appears to have been carved from some expensive solid material, finished to perfection and is just lying there waiting for some enthusiast to discover it decades later and restore it to its former glory! 

The back axle, gearbox and rear suspension are conventional to the extent that anything R-R is, and the brakes the same as all R-Rs post 1925 in that they have a servo on the side of the gearbox. The PII is best described as a heavily built, conservatively designed and exquisitely finished. The PIII is a whole new experience and has to be seen to be believed; toolmakers and model engineers will be in seventh heaven whilst designers, production engineers and service personnel will need counselling! Financial people are advised against even looking! 

The engine is even more remarkable and rather different from most of the time. Just like the Jack Phillips V8 used from the Cloud II onwards, the FB60 in the Vanden Plas 4L R and in much the same way as all aluminium engines are today, the block and crankcase are one piece with lipped cylinder liners, sealed by O-rings and pushed in from the top. In modern engines, the aluminium is plated or dry liners pressed in, so not quite the same but getting there.Unlike modern engines the big ends are “forked” which is complicated and expensive (and gave trouble at the time) but avoids having staggered cylinders, keeps the crankshaft as short as possible and thus helps to minimise torsional vibration. In the Phantom III one con rod (the forked one) is in two pieces and has four big end cap fixing bolts and a gap in its middle for the second rod with only two fixing bolts. The first holds a full width bearing shell and the centre rod runs on the outside of its housing. This lot has to be very accurately made and extremely carefully assembled if trouble is to be avoided. 

The camshaft sits on the centre of the V and operates through conventional tappets, pushrods and rocker arms to the overhead valves. On modern engines the tappets (cam followers) are the hydraulic bit but this engine is different; R-R copied Cadillac’ V12 and V16’s in that the rockers pivot on eccentrics on the rocker shaft. These have levers on them that are lifted to remove tappet clearance by small hydraulic rams sitting in the heads under the rocker covers. They were a constant source of problems at the time because of the quality of oil then available so as one of many alterations made in a production run of 727 cars, they were made solid. The engine also suffered excessive camshaft wear and this is usually blamed on tappet problems, which may be an incorrect assumption as most camshafts of the time were wearing prematurely and manufacturers didn’t really resolve the problem until the early fifties when R-R introduced the last camshaft, with more suitable profiles, for this engine.

In the timing cover are gears for the dynamo and water pump, camshaft gears, and a large idler gear to drive two twelve cylinder distributors via 99’ of plug lead to 24 plugs! One of the distributor shafts extends downwards into the sump to drive the large gear type oil pump and on the front of the crankshaft is R-R’s controversial, maintenance intensive, torsional vibration damper. There is one dual downdraft Rolls-Royce Zenith carburettor and beautiful finned exhaust manifolds. Altogether it is a mixture of lustrous black stove enamel, matt finished cast aluminium, an array of dull nickel plated fasteners and sundry other bits that by any standards, constitute a work of art, a thing of beauty and a monumental challenge to anyone who decides to rebuild it. 

The Body 

It is no secret that there had always been an uneasy alliance between coachbuilders and chassis makers. Pressed steel bodies were vastly more durable and far less expensive to produce and volume manufacturers were nearly all using them by the mid thirties. Coachbuilders were struggling to survive, were squeezed hard for low prices and they had been slow to adapt to the needs of cars rather than horses – their bodies were not durable, they creaked and rattled and it was not uncommon for doors to fly open on bumps and so on. The Carriage Trade had not helped by insisting on ever larger and more ungainly ones that ruined handling and sapped performance. As Leonard Setright rather unkindly observed: “The best of British? Barker coachwork on Rolls-Royce chassis was no worse, no more opulent or irrelevant, than that of the other famous coachbuilders. It revealed the British as a nation almost as immune as the Swiss to the real joys of motoring” 

Rolls-Royce was determined to control the size; weight, quality and rigidity of those fitted to PIIIs and drew up complex and demanding specifications that coachbuilders were supposed to adhere to. They were moderately successful and some PIIIs were built with extremely elegant and well-proportioned bodies of which Nick Whitaker’s Gurney Nutting Sedanca de Ville chassis no 3AZ168 is one of the most elegant of all. It was the seventieth chassis to be built.