Beschreibung:

This remarkable Rolls-Royce is the final example of a series of four experimental lightweight sporting cars developed in the latter part of the 1920s at the personal request of Henry Royce to explore the performance potential of the Phantom I chassis. In November 1925 Royce had expressed his disappointment that the recently introduced Phantom, with its overhead valve power unit, did not represent an improvement in terms of performance over the sidevalve Silver Ghost that it had replaced. Tests were carried out with chassis 10EX, fitted with a specially tuned engine and open sports tourer bodywork by Barker, but initially it proved only marginally faster than the standard model. The project had been initiated with the full blessing of Rolls-Royce’s commercial genius, founding managing director Claude Johnson, hence its in-house title “the CJ sports car”. But Johnson died unexpectedly early in 1926 and was succeeded by his more cautious brother Basil, who worried that the program might produce a “rough and noisy car, typical of the sports car of the day”. To reassure him, Henry Royce – who after all had initiated the project – wrote: “The object of preparing this chassis is that, if speed merchants in the form of English peers or Indian Rajahs or others doubt the capacity of the Rolls-Royce Phantom I, this specimen, which we should be able to repeat, can be tried by them… We have no thought of making a freak machine or to depart from the smooth and silent model, but we do think that the owners of the smooth and silent models within their large bodies capable of 80mph will be pleased to know that the same chassis and engine when fitted to a touring car will be capable of 95-100mph.” It was a line of thought that would ultimately lead to the Derby Bentley “silent sports car” of the 1930s, but in this early stage of Royce’s quest to produce a car with “a bit of fizz”, there was the problem that 10EX was not producing the hoped-for level of performance. In the immortal words of Ettore Bugatti of whose work Royce, as a former owner of a Type 13 Bugatti, was fully aware, “weight was the enemy”. Demands for greater levels of comfort and enhanced specifications were offsetting the extra power developed by the new engine: Consequently, recalled Rolls-Royce designer Ivan Evernden, who worked in the little studio established near Royce’s summer home at West Wittering in Sussex, “since 1911 cars, besides becoming materially bigger, had become disproportionately heavier. This fact, together with tires of large section and lower pressure, caused an increase in road rolling resistance. Even more important was the fact that the wind drag of the car had increased enormously due chiefly to the increase in the frontal projected area. The front wings had grown to envelop the wheels, headlamps had risen to add to the frontal area of the taller radiator and the higher bonnet and scuttle. Also, there was little improvement in the aerodynamic form.” Extra power was not the answer: opening the exhaust cutout – illegal, anyway, in Great Britain – added an extra 11hp, but only increased the speed by 2mph. So W.A.Robotham, assistant to Derby works manager Ernest Hives, carried out a series of tests on the Brooklands race track, progressively removing wings, sidemount spare wheels, headlamps and windshield. The results were remarkable: removing the wings alone gave an increase of 6.4mph in maximum speed, while the windshield, sidemount and under-hood ventilation were found to create a total of 11.4mph-worth of drag. Ivan Evernden was given the task of developing a new type of body design that would incorporate the results of these tests to produce an enhanced level of performance. He would spend almost a year developing a more efficient body shape. A major obstacle, he quickly discovered, was the entrenched attitude of many of the companies who erected bodies on Rolls-Royce chassis: “The classic coachbuilder of the day, a craftsman whose ancestors had buil