Making A Rolls-Royce Corniche Mulliner Park Ward Lance McCormack Pt1

Rolls-Royce Corniche Coupe Mulliner Park Ward Lance McCormack W1RRP Rolls Royce Podcast
Continuing our talking history of Rolls-Royce cars and Mulliner Park Ward, we find out more about life at the factory with Celebrity and Royal visits from Lance McCormack!
Founded in 1990 by Lance McCormack (Mulliner Park Ward trained), Romance of Rust is multi-concours award winning classic car restoration business. He is now celebrating his 41st year in the car restoration business.
Today, the company operates out of a 19th century industrial building on the Brentford dock area.
Lance started his training back in 1976 at Rolls Royce, Mulliner Park Ward division in North West London as a traditional panel beater craft apprentice. After which he spent 4 years at Roehampton making artificial limbs (to learn human form.) After that Rolls Royce asked him to return where his job which amongst other things included the training of apprentices on the shop floor. He then worked his way up to become the youngest ever Rolls Royce final inspector, responsible for finished car quality.
Notable cars that he has restored are John and Yoko’s Phantom V Limousine, The Alchemist (Gasser which has been heralded as Europe’s finest hot rod.) Since its debut at the Louis Vuitton Concours D’Elegance held at The Hurlingham Club, Planet Voodoo Mercury which has won awards and wowed audiences across Europe and beyond. He continues to work on many Aston Martin and Ferrari projects for high-end marque specialists, taking care of the detail metal work areas.
Lance has also worked for the film industry making Captain America’s shield and a pre-CGI mirror for Snow White and The Huntsman.
Lance also shares his expertise by teaching MA and international Royal College of art students the ways of metalworking for Product Design, Auto Design, Pure Art and Sculpture.
Being one of the few traditional coach builders left he is a refugee from the Industrial Revolution.
Mulliner Park Ward was a bespoke coachbuilder in Hythe Road, Willesden, London UK.
The R-Type Continental was a high-performance version of the R-Type. It was the fastest four-seat car in production at the time.

The prototype was developed by a team of designers and engineers from Rolls-Royce Ltd. and coachbuilder H. J. Mulliner & Co. led by Rolls-Royce's Chief Project Engineer, Ivan Evernden.[6] Rolls-Royce worked with H. J. Mulliner instead of their own coachbuilding subsidiary Park Ward because the former had developed a lightweight body construction system using metal throughout instead of the traditional ash-framed bodies.

The styling, finalised by Stanley Watts of H. J. Mulliner, was influenced by aerodynamic testing conducted at Rolls-Royce's wind tunnel by Evernden's assistant, Milford Read. The rear fins stabilised the car at speed and made it resistant to changes in direction due to crosswinds.

A maximum kerb weight of 34 long hundredweight (1,700 kg; 3,800 lb) was specified to keep the tyres within a safe load limit at a top speed of 120 mph (190 km/h).

The prototype, with chassis number 9-B-VI and registration number OLG-490, which earned it the nickname "Olga", was on the road by August 1951. Olga and the first series of production Continentals were based on the Mark VI chassis, and used a manual mixture control on the steering wheel boss, as these versions did not have an automatic choke.

Despite its name, the two-door Continental was produced principally for the domestic home market, most of the 207 cars produced were right-hand drive, with 43 left-hand drive examples produced for use abroad. The chassis was produced at the Rolls-Royce Crewe factory and shared many components with the standard R type. R-Type Continentals were delivered as rolling chassis to the coachbuilder of choice. Coachwork for most of these cars was completed by H. J. Mulliner & Co. who mainly built them in fastback coupe form. Other coachwork came from Park Ward (London) who built six, later including a drophead coupe version. Franay (Paris) built five, Graber (Wichtrach, Switzerland) built three, one of them later altered by Köng (Basel, Switzerland), and Pininfarina made one. James Young (London) built in 1954 a Sports Saloon for the owner of the company, James Barclay.
After July 1954, the model was fitted with an engine with a larger bore of 94.62 mm (3.7 in), giving a total displacement of 4.9 L (4887 cc/298 in³).

The rarity of the R Type Continental has made the car valuable to car collectors. In 2015 a 1952 R Type Continental, in unrestored condition, sold for over $1 million USD.


W1RRP The Podcast About Rolls-Royce + Bentley. W1RRP is pronounced WURP and is a new entertainment podcast all about Rolls-Royce and Bentley.
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Mulliner Park Ward Lance McCormack