From the Rolls-Royce experimental archive: a quarter of a million communications from Rolls-Royce, 1906 to 1960's. Documents from the Sir Henry Royce Memorial Foundation (SHRMF).
Performance, quietness, and development philosophy of the 3½-Litre Bentley.
| Identifier | ExFiles\Box 3\4\ 04-page368 | |
| Date | 28th June 1933 | |
| To WDH. from EH. re 3½-Litre Bentley. Copy to C. Hs.{Lord Ernest Hives - Chair} [Text is struck through] Thanks for Ror13/T27.6.33. I agree that Hives memo., to which you refer, is excellent. Yours has crossed mine of yesterday's date. I thought it was well to remind him of some of the early ideas and how we had really been forced to depart from them. On the question of my having said that the car should not be a 100 m.p.h. car, I think there must be some little confusion as I always expected that the supercharged small engined car would be capable of such a speed, but when we learnt that the 3½-Litre with the J.I engine would not and that it meant a special two-seater body etc. etc., I expressed the view at that date that I was anxious the Experimental Department should not start by getting busy on a 100 miles an hour car as I felt that it would take them off the main job and that the question of 100 m.p.h. car would come along as a normal development. I am very glad to note you believe that the 3½-Litre Bentley will be generally noisier than our standard production and I agree that it is important to quieten the RR still further for the reasons you mention and that no particular attention should be given to make the 3½-Litre as quiet as the RR. I am still concerned because the latest one as shown to me was considerably quieter than the one we tried on the day we met at Grantham. There is one other point that I intended to mention when writing to Hs.{Lord Ernest Hives - Chair} yesterday and that was that, when I had a similar unit in a 20/25 last summer on the Continent, I expressed the view in the beginning of my report that, whilst it was a delightful car to drive, it was less like a RR than anything I had ever driven bearing the RR name, but when I tried the No.2 car I was very much concerned to find that it had become very RR-like so far as quietness is concerned. I quite agree that we want to be able to get 90 miles an hour more easily, but at the same time we do not want to sacrifice the wonderful acceleration and I hope that with steady progress this result will be achieved. EH. | ||