Like a mallard moving serenely across the surface of a pond as its feet paddle furiously below – metaphor for the way a Rolls-Royce Silver Seraph gets down the road as its engine room works silently but busily to move more than two-and-a-third tonnes? Or is it an on-the-nose allegory for Britain’s car industry, its engineers and designers calmly turning out new products as executives and accountants flap around behind the scenes, wondering who the Dickens next week’s owner will be?
Perhaps a little of both, and a situation not unlike this played out in 1998, as the cosy relationship between Rolls-Royce and Bentley was rent asunder in a complex sale from Vickers to the Germans, which completed that year. When the dust finally settled, Rolls-Royce would be under the wing of BMW and no longer in Crewe, while Bentley kept its wartime home as part of the growing Volkswagen empire. Yet that separation ultimately didn’t happen until 2002. The cars, meanwhile, Rolls-Royce’s Silver Seraph and the Bentley Arnage, were seen almost as a sideshow. And just to add to that complex tale, they were both launched in 1998…
Sitting in Adrian Lewers’ inky-blue Silver Seraph, a quarter of a century removed from its maker’s turmoil, I’m wondering whether this was fair. Not the
