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).
Secret memo from BJ to Wor. regarding the development strategy for two new chassis series, a standard and a sports model.
| Identifier | ExFiles\Box 65a\1\ scan0134 | |
| Date | 1st October 1927 | |
| SECRET. To Wor.{Arthur Wormald - General Works Manager} from BJ. 1. There must necessarily be two series of these chassis: 1. The chassis which starts for 10,000 miles. 2. A chassis which may appear 6 or 12 months later with other improvements. I am most anxious to hear when you consider the first 10,000 miles test car can leave for France. If any of the absolutely necessary items are likely considerably to delay the chassis, perhaps you can suggest alternative methods of dealing with such items. You will be coming to London on Tuesday for the Board Meeting and, if you could be here in the morning with a full report, we could discuss the items more fully. In the meantime we are pressing forward with the construction of bodies. It occurs to me that, if it will not be too expensive, we might start making a number of the sports model chassis in parallel with the present standard chassis and only introduce the alterations on the standard chassis when we have used up all the standard chassis material. Therefore, the improvements would first appear on the sports model which is to be sold at a higher price, but this depends to a great extent on whether it would be more expensive to make two types of chassis over this period. I presume it would not necessarily follow that the public would jump to the conclusion that, because wewere incorporating certain alterations in the sports chassis, therefore we should certainly later include these in the standard chassis and that for this reason they would not buy the standard chassis? I should certainly be very disappointed if we cannot introduce a new sports car quite early in next year, as I am looking to the sale of about 50 of these to a certain extent to compensate us for the £100,000 we are losing every year on account of the extra cost of the Phantom with front wheel brakes and the 20 HP chassis, as compared with the two chassis we used to sell in the past. Would it be in time if we discussed on Tuesday your memo. Wor{Arthur Wormald - General Works Manager}4/T5-10-27, re ordering material? BJ. | ||