Foreign News: Swank

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Having survived the Earl of Cottenham's cuff, the Phantom III carried him "stealing quietly uphill. . . . I found myself incoherently delighted like a child. . . . Attempting to avoid nothing, in fact, choosing if anything, the worst pieces of surface, I sailed down the middle of Bishop's Avenue hating the whole performance like poison, for I loathe so to treat a car . . . potholes a foot deep are everywhere. . . . Cars with orthodox springing, even of the best kind, shake the teeth in one's head as they pass over Bishop's Avenue. . . . Ghastly thuds sounded beneath the car as the road wheels rose and fell, but the classic shape of the well-known radiator in front of me scarcely pitched. And watching my rear passengers in the driving mirror, I never once saw them leave their seats; they were merely lifted smoothly up and down, and not much at that.

". . . It is almost certainly the easiest car in the world to handle. A tiny 5 ft. woman would find it far more amenable on a greasy road than any other car I know. Only once or twice, as we drew close to the Watford-Barnet fork, did I drop to third gear, unable to resist the feel of the claws of speed so gently, modestly garbed in their silken sheaths."

Finally, according to Lord Cottenham. ''with the relentless surge of a hurricane, the big car went. It neither leapt, shot, howled nor roared, as other cars are not inaccurately described as doing according to their kind. It just moved forward very fast indeed. At about 50, I changed to third. At about 70, I changed to top. . . . Thereafter, I did 93. . . . These are speedometer speeds, but the speedometer is one that satisfies Messrs. Rolls-Royce. . . . Farther on . . . I spoke a word of warning to my passengers and did a quick pull-up from 80 with both hands off the wheel. I was ready to grab and hold her, but the car stopped in a dead straight line as though snatched by a vast magnet. . . .

"An almost inaudible whine, fainter than a mosquito, rose to my ears from the back axle. Only harsh critics would have heard it.

"'Presumably that's another detail for attention,' I remarked as I lit my pipe.

" 'Yes,' replied the Colonel. 'It will not occur in the finished products.'

"I knew he did not exaggerate in the least. . . .

"What I have written is simply the proud tribute of a keen driver to a magnificent machine made by some of his fellow-countrymen. . . . Once again Britain's best remains the World's best."*

Other foreign cars on sale in Manhattan last week were British:

The Lagonda at $6,750, the A. C. or "Acedes" at $3,475 and the S. S. or &"Standard Swallow" at $2,860 are high-performance 6-cylinder sport and semi-sport cars.

The M. G., which is never called anything but an "M. G.,"† is the supreme British bantam sport car and some of the firm's business is in supplying custom-made chassis to road-racing Britons who like to zip and roar. A minuscule M. G. has recently done 140 m.p.h. under test conditions in Germany. Those offered in Manhattan are a super-doodlebug at $1,435, promised to do 83 m.p.h., and a species of semi-sport sedan at $2,550 brought out this year in England for the first time by M. G.