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Ghost story
15 hours ago
Even by Ti standards, this was a pretty special gathering
So there are two things you need to know, the first more obvious than the second. When it was delivered, early in 1907 (I’m calling it 120 years because the car is likely at least to have started being built in 1906), those very few cars that existed back then, before even the first Model T Ford had been built, were rickety, fragile and notoriously unreliable. Even going to the pub was done more in hope than expectation that it would get you there and back without an unscheduled stop.
The second point, crucial to our story, is that at the time of The Silver Ghost’s creation, Rolls-Royce had been delivering cars to customers for barely two years. We think of it today as the most august, blue-blooded pillar of the automotive community, but back then it was a start-up. And like all such companies – and we know a thing or two about this at Ti – it needed to get itself noticed.
So managing director Claude Johnson, a man often referred to as ‘the hyphen in Rolls-Royce’ decided they needed a publicity stunt to publicise the arrival of the new 40/50hp model, with its huge 7-litre straight-six engine. So he took just the 12th chassis and commissioned coachbuilders Barker to build a ‘semi-Roi de Belge’ body for it in painted aluminium. Ever the opportunist and as something of an afterthought, he then had a plaque made up announcing that this was, indeed, ‘The Silver Ghost’ and screwed it onto the car. It remains there to this day.
"Johnson described it as ‘not one of the best, but the best car in the world’ a phrase that was pounced upon and proliferated by The Autocar"
They then set out to drive it further than any car had been driven before. Cutting an extremely long story very short, it was driven from London to Glasgow and then back again, a process that continued until the existing record of 7089 miles was broken. But they didn’t stop, carrying on and requiring no more than routine maintenance and puncture repairs on the appalling roads, intending to stop at 10,000 miles instead. But it seems The Silver Ghost was in no mood to quit.
They eventually gave up, presumably through boredom, after 15,000 miles, during the course of which the car had ground to an unexpected halt just once, when all the joltings from the barely surfaced roads shook the fuel tap shut. Then they took the engine, gearbox and back axle apart, measured everything with a micrometer and, discovering no detectable wear, put it back together again.
Johnson described it as ‘not one of the best, but the best car in the world’ a phrase that was pounced upon and proliferated by The Autocar. Rolls-Royce still has that reputation, and it all started here as, I should mention, did the spectral naming convention. But not, in case you’re wondering, the fabled Spirit of Ecstasy. She came along in 1911 when Johnson commissioned painter and sculptor Charles Sykes to produce a mascot and used actress Eleanor Velasco Thornton as a model to realise his vision, at least in part, even though the result looked nothing like her in face or form.
"This Ghost, introduced last year, uses the same unique to Rolls-Royce underpinnings as the Phantom, so it should be no surprise that being on board feels unlike any other car in the world"
Today we find it at Cotswold Airport, parked up next to two other famous Rolls-Royces: a new Ghost and the RB211 slung under the wing of the Boeing 747-400 you can hire for almost any kind of celebration or party you like, so long as you don’t mind staying on the ground. It’s £850 per hour, as you’re asking.
The RB211 is the most consequential Rolls-Royce engine of all, on land, sea or air. It is the engine whose development costs in the late 1960s bankrupted the company and forced it into government ownership, after which it was split up and the automotive division sold off. So if you’re wondering why BMW doesn’t own Rolls-Royce but merely the right to call a car a Rolls-Royce, you’re looking at it. The RB211 then went on to become a wildly successful aero engine, powering not just Boeings 747, 757 and 767, but also the Lockheed TriStar for which it was originally designed, and securing a future for the company that could not have previously been imagined. It is estimated there are between 1500-2000 of these engines still in regular use today.
Despite being what passes for an entry-level Rolls-Royce (£290,000 before you’ve even dared to ask for the options list), the new Ghost is Rolls-Royce from end to end, in a way that would never have been possible for its predecessor, which sat on an adapted BMW 7-series platform. This Ghost, introduced last year, uses the same unique to Rolls-Royce underpinnings as the Phantom, so it should be no surprise that being on board feels unlike any other car in the world.
The modern Ghost still glides in that authentically Rolls-Royce way
It’s not just the richness of the leather or the depth of the woollen carpets, it’s everything from the heft of the doors and the Range Rover-like driving position to the view down the bonnet to the little lady at the end and the utter silence inside, at least until you fire it up.
I was a little surprised that I could hear the 6.6-litre, twin turbo V12 so easily at idle. All you’re meant to be able to hear inside a Rolls is the ticking of the clock. But once underway, the character of your progress is inimitable. No other car glides like a Rolls-Royce, or like a Rolls-Royce should, and the way this one wafts you along, borne on an unseen pillow of torque and exquisitely selected suspension settings, marks it out as something different, a breed apart from anything else out there. Those who thought they were merely buying a badge attached to a luxury BMW are in for a very pleasant surprise.
However, and I hope understandably, it’s the ancestor that is commanding most of my attention today and for reasons both obvious – it is certainly one of a handful of cars with a valid claim to being the most valuable in the world – and less so. For as it happens I owe this car a lot. Indeed, it played a not insignificant role in saving my career because, believe it or not, this is not the first time I’ve driven it.
This was 1990 and back then the Ghost was still owned by Rolls-Royce. They wanted to raise awareness of a charity drive they were doing in it and as Autocar – or The Autocar as was– had covered every step of its adventures back in 1907, the magazine was invited to drive it a short distance from Barnet in north London to St John’s Wood. But no one on the staff at the time had the foggiest idea how to drive a car of that vintage save, as it happens, me.
It was not the happiest time of my career – I’d been drifting between the road test and news desks because nobody really wanted me – and even my continued employment on the title was far from a given. But off I toddled complete with some ludicrous Edwardian driving gear and climbed aboard, drove the car without damaging it and, I guess slightly buoyed by the fact I’d just driven a car no one at the world’s oldest car magazine felt able to drive, wrote a half decent story. Which made it at least twice as good as anything I’d written up until then. Thereafter I was trusted with more feature material or ‘colour stories’ as we called them, and confidence grew further as fears of impending unemployment receded.
I’ve always regarded that story not necessarily as a turning point in my career, but a significant landmark on the way to no longer being thought a complete idiot by my employer. So I owe it a lot. So best not mess it up this time either.
"The car was warm when I reached it but if my memory serve, were it cold you’d need to open the offside part of the bonnet and flood the single carburettor, then hop on board again and turn a dial to enrich the mixture"
You climb in via the passenger seat because it’s that much easier. You sit Range Rover high and so long as you don’t think about the value, it’s not too intimidating. If you did think about it, you’d have to run away fast. There are three pedals in front of you and only a couple of concerns with them even though they do what you expect them to do and even in the now-accepted order. The first is the clutch, which is fully depressed and doesn’t move. Turns out that’s because it’s a leather cone clutch that dries out if it doesn’t live in a puddle of oil when not being used, and just needs to be released before operation. The brake pedal, which appears to work just fine, is in fact, more disappointing because it doesn’t really work at all. It operates on the transmission only and I am advised to leave well alone. Braking – such as there is with just two small drums on the rear and nothing up front, is by handbrake which lives outside the car next to the gear lever. Could you grab the wrong one by mistake? Yes, you absolutely could.
The gearbox layout is interesting in a mildly terrifying way given what’s at stake. Obviously there’s no synchromesh but dusting down my double declutching technique is just the smallest of three challenges. The second is that you can’t just slide the lever into the next ratio – you need to locate the gearlever in a little notch adjacent to the gear position to get it to stay there and if horrid noises are to be avoided. And finally those gears – four of them – are laid out in a ‘U’ shape where first and second are forward and back, then it’s across and back into third and forward into fourth.
Now you’re ready to fire her up, so you just twist the key and go. Ok, it’s not quite that simple. First and most obviously, unchock the clutch. Then pump a floor-mounted handle until you have dialled up 2 psi of fuel pressure – your left bicep being the car’s one and only fuel pump. The car was warm when I reached it but if my memory (and 36-year-old Autocar story) serve, were it cold you’d need to open the offside part of the bonnet and flood the single carburettor, then hop on board again and turn a dial to enrich the mixture.
Then you set the hand throttle on the steering wheel to about halfway and dismount once more, going around to the front of the car and hand turning the crank fully eight times to suck up said mixture. Then it’s all aboard again to turn on both the magneto and trembler coil and fully retard the ignition on the other steering wheel column control if you don’t want your thumbs broken, before – you guessed it – getting out again and, this time with the car fully ‘live’, turn the crank one more time.
Starting the Rolls-Royce requires climbing out of the cabin several times
At least in theory. In my 2026 reality much of this performance is neatly sidestepped as not only is the car already warm as previously advertised, but at some stage in the last third of a century or so it’s picked up an electric starter which some will see as heresy and others as simple common sense. Like me.
The mighty engine is brought to life. You think of the engine rooms of vast old steamers as conrods and pistons start to ease their way up and down their bores. The Silver Ghost has six of each, mounted in two blocks of three, fired by a pair of sparkplugs each, which is why the uninitiated think they’re looking at the world’s one and only straight-twelve production car engine. Together they displace just over seven litres and despite entirely square dimensions are not exactly rev happy lunatics. Peak power, whatever it might be, is delivered at 1250rpm, which is fabulously leisurely, even by Rolls-Royce standards.
The Ghost is ticking over beautifully. Its voice is low, complex and uncannily smooth. It may be precisely twice as old as me, but this is a precision instrument put together by the best in the world.
I’ve already had a ride in it with the chap who looks after it driving beautifully, but now it’s my turn. I’d hoped the muscle memory might still be there because recently I drove an original Audi Quattro after a similar number of decades away, and somehow knew instinctively where all its controls were located and how they worked. But not this time. Truth is, I drove The Silver Ghost so briefly back in 1990, and in such sub-optimal conditions (north London traffic) I was clearly too spooked by the experience for much of it to sink in.
But this time the kind and brilliant folk at Cotswold Airport have given me a decent stretch of tarmac to try to remember what to do, and very little to hit. Tentatively, I find the first gear slot, gently raise the clutch and we are moving.
Is a 1907 Rolls-Royce a difficult car to drive? I’m not asking you, or speaking rhetorically, but really quizzing myself in the hope an easy answer will arrive. But it doesn’t. Some fabulously exotic beasts turn out to be complete doddles to drive, like the triple Le Mans-winning Jaguar D-Type. If you can drive a Ford Fiesta, you can drive a D. Other incredibly basic cars can be unexpectedly tricky, like my 1958 Citroën 2CV.
The truth is that most of the time The Silver Ghost is hard to drive and requires every mote of concentration you can muster. Every shift requires precise timing, decisive movement of your hand and positive, precise location in the next ratio. You need to judge the amount of throttle you add between each downshift pretty accurately, too. And not forget the gearbox layout.
You have, have, have to remember to slow by hand rather than foot and, of course, because you can’t slow and change down at the same time without running out of limbs, you need to think about that as well.
"Get it into third gear and you almost don’t have to bother about the gearbox again – it’s good for about walking pace to perhaps 40mph or more, so you only need top if the road ahead is long, level and clear"
You might think you’d be in danger of over-revving the engine given the powerband is probably less than 1000rpm wide, but in fact it’s no issue at all, even though there’s no rev-counter. So long as you are prepared to listen to what it’s telling you, the chances of extending it further than it cares to go are essentially zero.
The steering however, takes some time to understand, largely because it’s so wildly better than you expect. Rolls-Royce engineering, a very reactive helm and beaded edge tyres held on by pressure (70 psi of it, no less) alone mean you get a very big reaction for a very small input, the opposite of the oil tanker experience you might reasonably be expecting.
So that’s the difficult and unpredictable stuff. But there is one characteristic of this car which actually makes life very easy for you.
When after some hours we were done taking photographs of the two Ghosts I was asked if I’d like to drive it on the road, so I’d clearly not made a complete pig’s breakfast of the whole thing. Part of me did not: the shoot was in the can and the car still in perfect running order. What possible justification could there be for exposing it to the vagaries and unpredictability of the open road environment? None that I could think of. Except how could I turn down such an offer? I could not. So gingerly we stepped out in what felt like the Wild West compared to the safe haven of the airfield and at once The Silver Ghost came to my rescue. That thing that makes life easy? It’s torque.
Get it into third gear and you almost don’t have to bother about the gearbox again – it’s good from about walking pace to perhaps 40mph or more, so you only need top if the road ahead is long, level and clear.
And that’s when the magic really kicked in: driving this priceless machine on the public road, just like Charles, Henry and, of course, Claude did all those years ago. It allowed me to evaluate the ride too. I wasn’t expecting much of leaf springs and no shock absorbers, but in fact its soft settings and long wheelbase allowed it to lope along beautifully.
It was only when we were done that it occurred to me that the car had run as flawlessly as had the new Ghost all day long. Hour after hour, up and down through the gears, turning, reversing, idling, accelerating and then going out into the big wide world and keeping up with modern traffic as if that were what it had been designed to do all along. Honestly, if you asked it to drive to Glasgow and back right now, I have no doubt it would do so with the same insouciant ease as it did just six years after the death of Victoria, and four after we entered the age of powered flight. How it must have seemed in 1907, when horses outnumbered cars on the road by 50 to one, can scarcely be imagined.
There could be no better car in which to travel home than the new Ghost – or possibly a Phantom. After a day like that all you want to do is reflect as the miles flow by silently beneath you. I guess I wondered most whether, after driving the original, this Ghost still carried those same values of engineering excellence above all. In short, would Sir Henry have approved?
He would. No it’s not ground-breaking in the same way at The Silver Ghost, but no car is, nor could possibly be any more. But in its ride, refinement and construction quality it achieves that most important thing for a Rolls-Royce, arguably the single thing a Rolls must do above all – and that is to feel like no other car you can buy.
I set this story up suggesting The Silver Ghost was the most important British car of them all, more so than any E-Type or Mini, and if I’ve not yet convinced you perhaps I should point out that the only extant major car British manufacturer that was founded before The Silver Ghost is Vauxhall, which is nothing more than a rebranded Opel sold exclusively in the UK but not even manufactured here any more.
And of those that have died – Rover, Austin, Riley, Sunbeam, Lagonda and Standard among them – none came close to being as important to both Britain and the world in general as did Rolls-Royce. And even Rolls-Royce was all but unknown in the wider world before this car came along.
Which is why I say that the Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost is the car that, more than any other, put Britain on the automotive map. And while the Mini and E-Type were works of genius that made people think anew about how to create those kinds of car, their reputations were built on the backs of tens of thousands of examples for the Jag, and millions of Minis. The Silver Ghost did it on its own. Before it, a Rolls-Royce was, at best, a high quality curio. After it, a Rolls-Royce was The Best Car In The World, and in the eyes of many millions of people around the world, it remains so to this day.
To the owner of The Silver Ghost who agreed not only to make the car available, but trusted me to drive it on my own, I lack the words to convey sufficient gratitude, both on behalf of The Intercooler and myself in a personal capacity.
Vast thanks also to the staff of Cotswold Airport, not only for making this feature possible, but for the relentlessly positive and enthusiastic approach taken while doing so.
Photography by Olgun Kordal
The original Autocar story is now available for Ti subscribers to read free for one week starting today (25 June 2026). This link will take you straight there
