I’d driven by this car multiple times, but a car cover hid its classic lines. Still, the tall, boxy silhouette made it clear a Rolls Royce resided underneath. Recently though, a wind storm conspired to blow off the cover, and give me a peek at this paragon of British engineering. Despite the missing radiator shell, it’s clearly a Rolls Royce, and the square headlight bulbs point to an early to mid eighties US model.
Curbside Classic hasn’t covered many Rolls Royces, but if you’d like to see the complete catalog, there are three other articles:
First, Mike Butts gave us an overview of a 1982 Corniche Convertible.
Second, Perry Shoar took a look at a Carmarge.
Finally, Paul reported on a ’73 Phantom IV Drophead Coupe with Frua custom bodywork.
Although the rich are often associated with Country Club living, those who are truly serious about spending money head down to the marina and buy a boat, so it’s no surprise to see masts on the horizon of this shot. While I’d normally associate a Rolls with Marina Del Rey or Newport Beach, I found today’s photo model down at LA’s Cabrillo Marina in San Pedro. Some say San Pedro is a bit seedier than those addresses, but then this Rolls appears a bit seedier than most Rolls so I guess it all ties together.
Just in case you’ve forgotten what the Rolls Royce grille looks like, here’s a complete example to view and admire. Sold in the US from 1981 to 1989, The Mark 1 Silver Spirit came with a 6750 cc V-8 engine coupled to a GM Turbohydramatic 400. While the Silver Spirit used a new body, the driveline and floorpan were carried forward from the Silver Shadow (the previous model).
In response to the demands of emissions and safety regulations, many manufacturers slowed down model development in the seventies and eighties. Engineers modified existing power plants and added required safety equipment to existing platforms, rather than designing new vehicle platforms. However, Rolls Royce carried this approach to the extreme, keeping the Silver Spirit (along with its longer wheelbase cousin, the Silver Spur) in production through the late nineties.
Luxury makes weren’t immune to the influence of safety and emissions concerns on vehicle design, nor from demand for increased fuel economy. Unfortunately, these priorities did not always match up to the Rolls Royce design aesthetic. The fact that the owner removed the square shouldered Parthenon grille only emphasizes the disconnect. I’ve placed a circle in this image to highlight the curved body work at the point where it transitions to the traditional Rolls Royce grille. This subtle curve helps reduce aerodynamic drag, but when you look at the image of the complete car, the mishmash of curve and straight line creates a visual conflict.
As I mentioned, Rolls Royce also offered an extended wheelbase version of the Silver Spirit, called the Silver Spur. Short of reading the nameplate off the trunk boot lid (and this car lacks that nameplate), you have to check the rear door length to sort out the models. If the base of the rear door glass is roughly the same length as the front door, it’s a Spirit. If the rear door glass is four inches longer than the front door, it’s a Spur.
Rolls Royce fans don’t focus much on model years, but a given series did see minor changes from year to year. Our earlier front view showed the license plate mounted on the front of the bumper (rather than under it), indicating it’s a 1985 or newer Series 1. Based on the rear shoulder belts and rear headrests visible in this view, I’d narrow that down to the 1987 to 1989 range. Beyond that, you’re on your own.
I didn’t have the opportunity to shoot the engine bay on our San Pedro car, but based on this internet picture, there’s plenty of cool stuff to photograph. Note the A/C compressor: it came from of the Harrison Radiator Division of General Motors, but that clearly labeled oil fill cap, those alloy valve covers and big ol’ Bosch fuel injection distribution manifold are all pure Rolls Royce, and all three peg the cool meter.
This close up of the rear axle also shows us cool tech. That ten bolt hub inside the wheel bolts indicate this axle uses full floating wheel hubs. Just about every other rear wheel drive car in the world uses the axle shaft to support the vehicle weight, but not this Rolls. Instead, the rear wheels have dedicated bearings to support the vehicle weight, and the axle shafts just transmit engine power. On most vehicle lines, this design starts appearing on 3/4 ton pickups, and is embraced by all over the road tractors, but not RWD sedans. This axle tells me Rolls Royce builds a solid, long-life car.
A solid, long life car, but not a driver’s car. The Rolls Royce steering wheel pictured here would work very well mounted on a city bus steering column. In an episode of “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee,” Jerry Seinfeld picked Carl Reiner in a (1960) Silver Cloud Series II. During the episode, Jerry stated “As a car, it’s horrible. But it’s a nice living room.” Based on everything I’ve read, these eighties-era cars fit that description as well. Rolls designed their cars to coddle passengers, rather than deliver quality driving dynamics. Since many of the cars were driven by hired help, the formula worked.
That formula has remained in place to this day, with Munich bankrolling ever faster platform development. Where today’s Rolls-Royces remain cars to cosset their occupants, so much else about the company has changed since our featured car was built. To describe the path from this mid-eighties Curbside Classic to the car shown here calls for more than time than we have, but one thing seems crystal clear: today’s Phantom is not your father’s Rolls Royce.
A used Rolls Royce is now in the price range of mid range drug dealers and wide boys.It still turns heads but it’s no longer as exclusive.
I’m not a fan of Rolls Royce,especially the latest models,I’d much sooner have a Bristol,Jensen or other Anglo/Euro/American exotica.
Great find Dave! I like when there’s a little mystery surrounding a curbside classic. This car most definitely has some stories to tell. I’ve never particularly cared for Rolls Royces from any era. Always too stuffy and “living room on wheels”.
Fugly looking thing , all beat up too ~ someone oughta shoot it and end it’s misery .
-Nate
I second the motion!!!
Blindfold please!!!
Most likely, this unit is gonna die to preserve remaining units of its brethren as these are outrageously expensive to maintain and restore…
Look at this one…
http://jalopnik.com/this-terribly-abused-broken-rolls-royce-is-worth-290-0-1582852217
The Phantom has the most elegant dash-to-axle ratio of any car in production today. The old Silver Spirit/Spur… not so much. It just looks like 3 very large, slightly melted boxes glued together. As much as I respect tradition and love classic cars, you can see that BMW ownership saved the marque.
Interesting – I’ve never noticed that curvature of the front adjacent to the grille. I was a groomsman for a very good friend who had two Spirits as wedding cars, and we spent half a day travelling in them and getting up close with them (the cars!) for the wedding photo shoots, and I still didn’t notice that curvature! I did notice that aside from being seated quite high off the ground, they didn’t feel nearly as big inside as expected. Oh, and the ’94 Spirit the bridesmaids were in was waaaay faster than our groomsmens’ ’82 model.
I never noticed that curvature before either, but it was readily apparent in the second picture with the grille shell missing, even before Dave pointed it out. Now I can’t stop seeing it. I have to wonder how much that slightly curved front fascia really improved aerodynamics.
> one thing seems crystal clear: today’s Phantom is not your father’s Rolls Royce.
But it still has a curved front end with the traditional squared-off RR grille shell in the middle.
It’s also always surprised me that the Spirit and Shadow shared a floorpan – the Spirit looks so much bigger to my eyes. The exterior styling of both Shadow and Spirit may be a tad bland perhaps, but I think it’s helped both age well. The Seraph, with its fussier styling, more conscious of the times, not so much.
I like the current Rollers immensely. As a child RRs were the ultimate, somehow unreachable, the car you always wanted but couldn’t afford. The Spirit kind of broke that somehow, and the Seraph seemed a desperate grasp at a fading star. The BMW-financed Phantom changed that – it restored RR to the top of the automotive food chain. I can afford and old Shadow or Spirit now, but don’t want one. I would love a Phantom though, and suspect they’ll retain enough cachet that I’ll never be able to afford one.
There was a Phantom on Jalopnik the other day for $40,000. German luxury cars of the gadget era are worth little more than scrap after a decade.
Nice find. I had a chance at one of these quite cheap. The guru/cult leader Bhagwan Rajneesh bought a small fleet of these and had them repainted in some of the wildest paint jobs ever put on a car. About 6 of them were up for auction one year at Auburn in the 80s and they sold incredibly cheaply for a late model Rolls. But I did not bid.
Someone was trying to sell a factory (!) pink Spirit here last year. I think the interior was grey leather piped with pink. It was temptingly-priced, but any savings made would have been balanced out by the boatload of rattle can matte black paint the successful purchaser may have wanted to buy.
Looking for a picture of one, I was reminded that it was actually a very large fleet. Here is one.
Strictly speaking, Bhagwan Rajinessh didn’t buy them, he let it be known to his followers that he very much liked being given them, and that he would look with favor upon those that did. It’s all quite a story; his “city” was in the hills of Eastern Oregon, whose name reverted back to Antelope. We’ve stopped by there once or twice; the Antelope Cafe has lots of pictures and newspapers on the wall.
I lived in Dallas when Bob Roethlisberger, a Texas millionaire, bought 85 Rolls-Royce for about seven million dollars.
http://jplaffont.photoshelter.com/gallery-image/RAJNEESHPURAM/G0000LE31T0QbgBk/I0000FPYwrz02Ip8
He brought almost half of them to Dallas after initially selling the rest individually due to the cost and logistic nightmare of shipping them from Oregon to Dallas.
We had a chance to see them up close and personal. Most of them were easily identified as Rajneesh by New Age artworks airbrushed on the bodies and glittery odd colour-combination paintwork.
The first reference to the Bhagwan that I have seen in two decades. Of course, it comes up here!
Great find and great article. These are the new bombers, a battle-axe with little subtlety and increasingly less residual. I think curvature was used much more effectively on the Shadow, which compared with its forebears was as rectilinear as this Spirit. The new Rolls is one of my favourite looking new cars, they’re finally figuring out how to do the headlights. Thanks Dave.
The CC effect: there’s an older guy driving a black Spirit around town the last few days. He drives it very gently. By the looks of him, I’m guessing he’d like to avoid any expensive repairs.
I did not know that RRs used a full floating axle.
I am a huge Rolls-Royce fan and have numerous books on them, yet none have ever mentioned the floating axles. Thanks so much for this interesting and important fact! I march to a different drummer, and I have always found the early 80’s Silver Spirits with the American headlamps to be quite beautiful. I suppose it is because the Shadow was so long in the tooth, that a new Rolls-Royce was like a new Corvette–BIG news! Another way to tell a Spur from a Spirit is that Spurs always came with a full vinyl roof and had a slightly smaller rear window. Technically, the Spirit was built on a Shadow platform, but the rear suspension was new, and significantly, the Spirit’s hydraulic/leveling system went to mineral oil, instead of the always corrosive brake fluid of the Shadows. Basically all American-sold Spirit/Spurs were fuel injected. I find the Seraph to be an elegant, “feminine-looking” car, while the current Phantom reminds me of a pimpmobile. SUV proportions do not a luxury car make. The new Ghost is far more tasteful.
These have always seemed like very ordinary looking cars for what they are to me. In this condition, there are probably many onlookers who see this one from a distance and mistake it for an American midrange sedan of the 80s.
It’s taken me years to realize how brilliant that was.
Americans – and pretty much only Americans, and for that matter only the traditionalist old-money crowd among those able to buy a new Rolls, expect the Rolls-Royce to reflect the understatement they perceive in the British upper class. And it was the Thurston Howell crowd who bought them in the Spirit/Spur’s day.
By making it blend in with the B-Bodys and Panthers, Rolls was able to satisfy that demand while remaining just as in-your-face, screw-you-I’m-loaded as ever to home-market buyers. The headlights underscored this, and IIRC Rolls kept them for years after the sealed-beam requirement was dropped.
(And it’s almost as quiet as a Ford LTD!)
Driving through downtown L.A. on my way to work, I frequently see one of these, a white one, parked in front of one of the off-campus dorms near USC. It looks to be in decent shape overall, but has a major case of lead butt ( rear end sag ) . Whether it belongs to a student or some student’s off-campus lover I have no idea.
One day in the 1980s, My friend and I was driving through the campus of Southern Methodist University in Dallas. We saw a sorority girl walking with a laundry basket from her sorority house to her car, a pristine red Rolls-Royce Corniche Drophead like this one:
http://a.imageshack.us/img837/5969/rollsroycecornicheconve.jpg
We didn’t know what to make of this sight…
I think Rolls Royce went into a long period of decline after WW2, perhaps because the parent company did not give the motor car division much in the way of resources or perhaps there was a lack of direction. The cars were seen as prestige cars and building them to a certain standard of workmanship continued, but the basic design of the cars architecture seemed to become quite dated. BMW seems to have a plan, and the cars are greatly improved, although styling was a bit off at first.
There are very few where I live, and I have not seen one in a number of years.
I have loved this marque from my earliest memory and have belonged to the RROC for over twenty years attending both regional and national meets with many interesting enthusiasts. For me Rolls-Royce has not made a handsome car since the Shadow/Wraith/Corniche. The Spirit/Spur have more room and are easier maintained, but I would rather have a Shadow/Wraith any day. As for the new Phantom,,,,I wish the company had been allowed to died a dignified death. The Spirit/Spur has sent a new low in Rolls-Royce resale.
On many European models I prefer US sealed beam headlamps but not on Rolls-Royce. It was interesting to learn about the shape of the surround for the grille and wheel bearing location. Oddly I find the white car down at the marina more attractive than the other white car in this post. I hate bodyside moldings where they don’t belong.
I don’t see a 3rd brake light? I think it might be before 1985-1986, especially with that small dual knob dial radio, I think that by 1985-1986 Rolls was borrowing another part from the GM bin, the big din Delco 2000 series radio. I think this might be an early 80’s Roller.
Could be- European marques tended to embrace rear seat shoulder belts a bit earlier than the US manufacturers.
This CC remind me of a fixer-upper 1984 Rolls Royce Silver Spirit that’s been advertised in my local Craigslist for several months. The ad gets reposted every few weeks and each time, the details get more skimpy. I’m sure these are lovely cars to own, but the thought of repairing or restoring one makes me shudder. Jay Leno makes it looks easy, but I don’t have his resources to take on a project like this.
I owned an’ 84 Silver Spirit about 6 years ago. It was a great cruiser and drew a lot of attention, which was part of the fun. When I first bought it I took it to my mechanic and he said, “This thing is going to cost you $1,000 a month to keep it running.” About 3 months in his prophecy began to come true, the steering rack went bad, a mere $3,000 fix. New tires were in order after about 6 months, special order Avons (which are basically white wall truck tires to handle the weight) from England only $2,000 installed. At 14 months the steering rack went bad again and was out of warranty, another $3k. At about 18 months the brakes went out, it needed a new proportioning valve and the other hydraulics rebuilt, $6,200. Not to mention the minor stuff in between like exhaust gasket leak, various Lucas breakers causing electrical havoc, and an a/c system that dumped ice cold water on the passenger’s feet. Add to that several 60 mile trips on a flatbed wrecker to the closest guy that would work on the thing. The brakes were the straw that broke the camel’s back and I sold it shortly thereafter. It was great when it was running, but I could have bought a nice compact car with what it cost me to run it for a little less than 2 years.
I love these pieces on rare/unusual marques and models. Although Rollers have never been my cup of tea, we used to service two 70s-era Silver Shadows at my Volvo store (the nearest Rolls dealer being almost 1000 miles away). And last year while in SF I saw my first Phantom Coupé in the flesh, sitting (appropriately) at curb side. Still not what I’d consider to be a handsome car, but wow, did it ever have presence!
I’ve seen a handful of these in person, and they have a certain gravitas that is absent in most other cars. Very restrained, with the most so being a black Spur II that I used to see around Raleigh occasionally. The uninformed might mistake it for a B-body or panther at a glance, but to stand and study it, the night and day difference becomes apparent quickly.
Given the choice I’d still take a Shadow, or if we’re going to have to spend a fortune on maintenance anyway, why not go for the gold and let’s find a Cloud II. But I do have an appreciation for these cars, compromise and all.
The new Phantom to me is a fine car, and an attractive one, but I have a hard time reconciling it with the post-WWII Rolls cars. It shares more with some of the extravagant prewar coachbuilt cars. Not that that’s a bad thing.
Wow, the floating axle is news to me. It isn’t nearly as hyped as the Citroen-based hydropneumatic suspensions, which I believe was gone for this model anyway.
Well, it’s hardly in the same league. The full floating axle was just a touch of old-school over-engineering, but with no perceived actual benefit. The Citroen’s suspension made itself very much felt, over every bump and pot hole.
I’d most likely cast more than that pile of crap is worth to fix the body damage. It’s time to put it out of it’s misery and let it become a Chrysler.
And that would be an improvement?
Until you drive and own one you have no idea ! These cars are meant to be driven . And the more you drive it the more you appreciate it . I am a car guy and I appreciate a vehicle that was limited in production and practically handmade . It is no different than the guy that is constantly dumping money into his Harley etc ..
Nice article, although for a photograph of what a nice-looking Silver Spirit should look like, choosing one in any colour other than white – and without tacky side rub strips – would have been nice! All SZ series (Silver Spirit/Spur/Mulsanne/Turbo R/Eight/Brooklands) had the number plate mounted on the bumper and had rear shoulder belts. The dilapidated car you pictured is circa 1981-83 as evidenced by the style of garnish rails to the doors and the rectangular digital display in the centre of the facia.