Description
The Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow was a luxury saloon car built from 1965 until 1980 and was the first Rolls-Royce to be constructed using a monocoque chassis and, to date, has the largest production volume of any Rolls-Royce. The original Shadow was 3½” narrower and shorter than the Silver Cloud which it replaced, but managed to offer increased passenger and luggage space thanks to more efficient packaging made possible by its construction. Aside from a more modern appearance and construction, the Silver Shadow introduced many new features such as disc brakes instead of drum brakes and independent rear suspension rather than the ageing live axle design of previous cars.
The pre-1970 Shadow 1 featured a 172 bhp 6.2 Litre V8 coupled to the same 4-speed automatic gearbox as the Silver Cloud sourced from General Motors. The car’s most innovative feature was a high-pressure hydraulic system licensed from Citroen, with dual-circuit braking and hydraulic self-levelling suspension. At first, both the front and rear of the car were controlled by the levelling system; the front levelling was deleted in 1969 as it had been determined that the rear levelling did almost all the work. Rolls-Royce achieved a high degree of ride quality with this arrangement.
A later Series 1 model, this wonderful original Silver Shadow was owned from new by a family based in Jersey in the Channel Islands. The Shadow is finished a rare colour scheme of Shell Grey Metallic with a lovely green leather interior, more often seen in the earlier Cloud models and not normally specified for the Shadow.
Over the years the Rolls was serviced by main distributor St. Helier Garages, with a total of 17 dealer services being recorded in its lifetime. Due to bereavement the Shadow was stored carefully from 2006 to 2016, after which it was carefully recommissioned by specialist Walker and Balmforth Rolls-Royce and Bentley.
Supplied with a MOT certificate valid to 2019, and in excellent condition in all respects, this is the nicest low mileage Silver Shadow we have seen for a long time.
