Just before BMW and Volkswagen had their fight for ownership of Rolls-Royce and Bentley, the small Crewe-based subsidiary of the Vickers engineering company had been attempting to design the latest version of the best car in the world. It was a bit like asking a yacht-maker to build a destroyer.
But producing underfunded contenders for the “best car in the world” title had long been the company’s task. Rolls-Royce had been saddled with this mission ever since it really had made the best cars in the world, 60 to 70 years previously, and had proudly proclaimed the fact. By the late 1990s, the Spirit of Ecstasy had been flying aboard the radiator grille of essentially the same car – the Silver Spirit – for almost two decades. Vickers, a somewhat troubled aviation and shipbuilding company, struggled to pay for a replacement, the project occasionally stalling for lack of funds.
The result was an almost decade-long development period. The Silver Seraph and the identically bodied Bentley Arnage appeared in 1998, equipped with only some of the technology needed to compete with the best from Mercedes and BMW. That they had any of this kit at all was because some of the best of BMW could be found aboard the new Seraph. The Munich company supplied help and hardware that included its 5.4-litre V12 engine, the 5-speed automatic that came with it, an electrical architecture, and plenty more.
Disappointingly, given the Seraph’s price, some of the BMW-sourced components were visible inside, where the crisply formed matt black switchgear of a 7 Series’ electric window and seat controls jarred against the chromed baroque extravagance of Rolls-Royce’s toggles, knobs, and organ-stop switches.
The Seraph was thus the first V12 Rolls-Royce since the 1939 Phantom III, the company abandoning its 6.75-litre pushrod V8 from the early 1950s. It was an advance that seemed great in theory, the BMW V12 vastly more modern and efficient. Trouble was, it was built for cars of sporting temperament, doing its best work at revs unseemly for a chauffeur-driven Rolls.
The five-speed auto didn’t help either. Ambling in fifth might have been more economical, but if an instant gobbet of thrust was required to overtake a serf in a Ford Fiesta, you were going to have to wait for the transmission and engine to respond before imposing your authority.
The Seraph powertrain was undeniably modern, but not so effective in a car of old-fashioned requirements. These needs were rather too evident in the chassis department. The Seraph’s quest to ride without rippling the open pages of the Financial Times caused it to teeter uncertainly through turns. Familiarity and a certain amount of reckless abandon would uncover a chassis more able than it first appeared, but this was a car that you’d happily leave your chauffeur to conduct.
