Rolls-Royce Phantom - Bare Nessecities

You may have noticed a female presence in the posts this week; well don't fret if you aren't a fan of scantily-clad women with your automotive fetish, as this is a one-week a year thang we do as a tenuous link to Valentines day.

It also gives us a good excuse to post pictures of this Rolls-Royce Phantom. If you can muster up all of your self-control and look past the lovely Lucia Tovar, you'll see a Phantom owned by Diko Sulahian, the owner of WTW corporation, which designs and manufactures wheel brands such as Giovanna, GFG, Gianelle and G-Racing wheels. Their wheels have kept folks flustered and appeared in a slew of music videos, as well as celebrity-owned rides, so when it came to one of his own personal cars, it comes as no surprise that it rolls with his companies wheels. Diko decided to run with two different styles to provide two different looks - one more classy, and the other much more ominous. On the passenger side you'll find a set of blacked-out GFG Trento 7 rims with black centers while the driver's side flaunts Giovanna Gello wheels with optional black spoke caps. The wheels are all 10 inches wide and wrapped with 315/30/24 rubbers all around.

See? The more you look at the car, the less you notice Lucia. Oh go on then, you can drool now.

- Amazosan

1939 Rolls-Royce Phantom III Vutotal Cabriolet

The 1939/47 Rolls-Royce Phantom III "Vutotal" Cabriolet by Labourdette, now in the John Rich Museum collection, started off as a standard Phantom III designed by Henry Royce. It was re-bodies by coachbuilder Hooper and Co. in 1938 with a Sedanca de Ville body style (as the car in the picture below), then showed off in Europe before being tweaked for the U.S. market.

When the very same show car ended up in the Parisian studio of Henri Labourdette in 1947, as a commission by the flamboyant Louis Ritter, he let Labourdette go all out. It was the designer's last and arguably most daring work. He threw out everything but the running gear and rebodied the car in gold-plated-and-brass-adorned aerodynamic bodywork that swooped back into a boattail. He also got rid of anything that identified it as a Rolls, save for its mascot and a couple of interior trim pieces. The car takes it's name from the Vutotal windscreen, a thick slice of glass that appears to support itself.
The whole conversion cost $44,000 (equivalent to about $500,000 now) at a time when the average price of a home was about $4,000...

After it was transformed into Labourdette’s creation, the car was sold off to different owners, including a New York plastic surgeon, a drug dealer who ended up in a Cuban prison and even S. Mars, possibly of the Mars (as in chocolate) empire. In the winter of 2005 John W. Rich (how appropriate) of Pottsville, Pennsylvania purchased the car for his extensive collection.