How many did you say??
by Terry Walker

 

Let’s just imagine for a moment that you have won Lotto and you have decided to build a collection of all the major variations of the Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow. Now, I’m not talking about paint and trim variations here. I’m talking about significant variations.

After all, you’ve got a nice Series 1 Standard Steel saloon as a starting point. So how many cars would you need to make up a complete set?

Well, you’re going to need a seriously big garage. More like an aircraft hangar in fact. Despite the fact that the advent of the monocoque Silver Shadow spelled the end of the coachbuilding era, there is an astounding variety of Shadows and Shadow-derivatives.

Let’s count them up.

1, 2: Series 1 standard steel Silver Shadow and Bentley T

3, 4: James Young Series 1 two-door saloons. 50 were built in 1966 by coachbuilders James Young, 35 R-R and 15 Bentley. These were straight 2-door conversions of the standard coachwork.

5, 6: Silver Shadow 2-door saloon and Bentley T 2-door saloon. We call these MPW coupes today, and they have the elegant styling which was later rebranded Corniche. You can be a “lumper” or “splitter” here: I’m going to lump the Series 1 Corniche with its MPW predecessor.

7, 8: Silver Shadow Convertible and Bentley T Convertible. These were the first cars the factory officially called convertibles. Before this, the open cars were “drop head saloons”. Again, I’m going to lump the MPW and Series 1 Corniche versions together.

9, 10: Long wheelbase Series 1 Silver Shadow and long-wheelbase Bentley T. Very early examples had standard sized rear windows; later they all had smaller privacy type windows. Again, I’m lumping the small and large window models together.

11, 12: LWB Series 1 Silver Shadow and Bentley T with chauffer division. I separate these out, split rather than lump, because they are significantly different from the non-division models.

Well, here we are, still with the early chrome-bumper Series 1 cars, and we’re up to a dozen! You’d better start enlarging that aircraft hangar because there’s more to come!

13, 14: Series 1½. What, I hear you say, is a Series 1½? Well, as we all know, the Company pioneered new developments on the Corniche series, and introduced the flash new Series 2 dashboard in the last handful of Series 1 chrome-bumper Corniches. I’ve seen one, and it’s true. There were Bentleys and R-Rs involved.

15: The Pininfarina Bentley. A single Pininfarina-styled and built two-door coupe from the fabled Italian coachbuilder appeared at a motor show in the late 1960s. It still exists, but I have to tell you the Corniche is prettier.

16, 17: Series 2 standard saloon, both R-R and Bentley.

18, 19: Series 2 Corniche, both R-R and Bentley

20, 21: Silver Wraith 2 (the former long-wheelbase model, re-branded), both R-R and Bentley

22, 23: Silver Wraith 2 with chauffer division.

24: Camargue. Yes, the Camargue is a Silver Shadow Series 2 with Pininfarina coupe coachwork. It was only available as an R-R, although one Bentley version was built to special order. I’m going to ignore the one-off, which still exists by the way.

Here we are, two dozen cars already. Are we there yet?

Nope.

You see, we’ve lightly skipped over the fact that there are two significantly different Series 1 cars. There are the early cross-ply tyre versions, and the later radial tyre versions which have radically different suspension to absorb harshness, and noticeably flared wheelarches to allow fatter tyres. Now all of the Series 1 models I’ve already mentioned were available in pre- and post- radial suspension models, except of course the James Young two-door saloons and the one-off Pininfarina Bentley.

25-34: So that’s another ten cars in the ever more crowded hangar.

At this point I lose count. How do we treat, for instance, the later Series IV and so on Corniches, which remained in production many years after the Shadow ended. And what of the Bentley Continental Convertible, which was re-branded from the Bentley Corniche in the 90s?

But it gets better.

We haven’t given a moment’s thought to Left Hand Drive versions! Eek!

Let’s just say that you could have your hangar stuffed with 60 or more Silver Shadow based cars, and no two would be the same.

I’d better lease a second hangar!