Excellence at all costs

The Phantom III embodied all that Rolls-Royce had to offer in terms of both luxury and technical sophistication, but it came at a price

- MARTIN BUCKLEY

For some, the Phantom III represents the apogee of RollsRoyce technical achievement in the years before WW2. This multi-cylindered chariot of the gods set new standards of refinement and engineering excellence in a world where the firm's leadership in luxury-car making was no longer taken wholly for granted.

Yet for others it was an overbred car, made too complicated for its own good in the pursuit of excellence at any cost. Those sceptics might point to the early reliability problems and its demanding servicing needs; the fact that sales were always slow (715 cars in four years, maybe 200 a year); or that the bodies it wore were not always as elegant as those fitted to the more classically proportioned Phantom II.

Phantom IIIs were produced in chassis series A to D, latterly with four-port cylinder heads, solid tappets and single valve springs modifications that are said to have boosted power from 165bhp to 180bhp in the overdrive-equipped D-series cars. Difficulties with new technology - such as zero-lash tappets (causing premature camshaft wear), leaky oil coolers and overheating - perhaps made Rolls-Royce shy of innovation in subsequent post-war models, but these problems were usually the result of poor maintenance rather than bad design.

Not until the Silver Shadow some 30 years later would the firm build a car as complex as the Phantom III. Based around the architecture of two 25/30 engines on a common crankshaft, the mighty 60° wet-liner V12 used 24 spark plugs, plus twin coils and distributors - both with 'test' positions for tracing faults. The lubrication system employed three filters that metered the oil at different pressures depending on the environment: 25psi at the crank, 10psi for the valvegear, and 1.75psi for timing gears and auxiliary drives.