Pinch yourselves. Try to take it all in. What you see in the opening picture is history being made. It is the first time a 12-cylinder Phantom III from 1937 has been summoned to meet a 2004 Phantom. Two Rolls-Royces separated by 64 years, a World War and a Cold War. As you can imagine, we are a bit proud about it all. Actually, we are over the moon and heading towards Proxima Centauri. No PR agency, no magazine, no television crew and not even BMW, who build the new Phantom, thought of this significant reunion. We dreamt of it for two months and tried our best to make it happen. Why? Boy, do we have to explain?
These automobiles are extremely special. The 1937 Phantom III was the first ever 12-cylinder Rolls-Royce and it was the first car to roll out of the Crewe factory after the death of Henry Royce (Charles Rolls had met his maker 23 years before that). The 2004 Phantom is the first car to bear the RR crest and the ‘Spirit of Ecstasy’ mascot after the factory was sold to Volkswagen. Royce had overseen the work on the Phantom III and ensured that the car he would never live to see brought the ‘best motorcar in the world’ title back to Rolls-Royce. BMW, who build the new Phantom in a small factory in Goodwood, UK, want their car to be the ‘best in the world’ too. The 1937 Phantom III was born because of some fantastic competition from Daimler, Cadillac, Lincoln and Packard who were building magnificent 12-cylinder luxury cars. The 2004 Phantom was built to take on not just the finest from Mercedes-Benz and BMW, but the ‘ultimate’ automobile that wore the re-born Maybach badge.
Now, allow me a mild bout of chest thumping. I have driven the new Maybach and now the new Phantom. And the Mercedes S-Class, the Audi A8 and the BMW 7 Series. Now that it’s off my chest, let me tell you it wouldn’t be prudent of me to say one is better than the other – because I am not the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, and even if someone made me one today, I think I would want a Porsche 911 to play with. You get the idea; I am not qualified to pronounce a winner here. Before the question pops up from you, let me say that we wanted to bring the new Maybach and the new Phantom together for a story – but then things went wrong the only way things can go wrong when something so magnificent is about to happen. The only Maybach we could have driven met with a minor mishap and DaimlerChrysler India couldn’t get it ready for our shootout. But even when we planned to bring the two Phantoms together, we had swallowed our share of butterflies. You, see anything could have gone wrong – it is not every day that a 1937 Phantom is woken up to run on Mumbai roads. We could have been stopped by cops simply because the 2004 Phantom doing PR duty in India wore British numberplates. The old Phantom could have refused to start, the new Phantom would have ended up in a customs warehouse... the list goes on.
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