Days, David Webb inhales the adrenaline and testosterone of Ferrari owners minding their prancing horses’ maintenance schedule.
Evenings, he exhales in a two-car garage behind his house in Willowdale, Ont., distanced from his responsibilities as Ferrari of Ontario service manager, retreating to the 1959 Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud he anticipates completing “in a year or two.”
A Ferrari Enzo arrived at the dealership for its annual inspection of vital fluids as this was written: some of us go a lifetime without seeing an Enzo. The 400th and final example, originally presented by Ferrari to Pope John Paul II, last year sold for $6.05-million at RM Sotheby’s Monterey auction.
The last LaFerrari, the 960-horsepower hybrid successor to the Enzo, was auctioned in December for $9.3 million at the Ferrari Finali Mondiali gathering at Daytona Beach, Fla. with proceeds going to the reconstruction of central Italy.
Whereas, the price for Webb’s Silver Cloud in 1959 was $14,735, its six-cylinder motor generating 155 horsepower.
Ask Webb how the elderly Brit has come to occupy his spare hours as it does, he begins telling his life story. “Quick bio, my father was an old car collector. We had a farm up near Creemore where he kept his Model A Ford and ...”
Any Canadian who remembers Rompin’ Ronnie Hawkins ruling the Coq d’Or bar on Toronto’s Yonge St. strip in the 1960s, may remember as well Canada’s most famous Silver Cloud. Hawkins famously paid cash for it after being snubbed by a salesperson who failed to recognize him as rockabilly royalty.
Gordon Lightfoot told the tale in his song, Talking Silver Cloud Blues, and in the process clearly documented how the Rolls-Royce was nonpareil among luxury cars:
Got my first Cadillac in 1954, since then I’ve had five more, Mercedes-Benz and a Porsche or two
The other day I was thinking this wouldn’t do’Cause the price of a Cadillac times two, comes out to the price of a Rolls-Royce new
But soon the Cadillac’s obsolete and the Rolls-Royce is still running sweet.
Webb was only three when the song debuted in 1969, so his fascination for Rolls-Royce can’t have been rooted in the Hawkins legend. He does, however, remember becoming a mini-motorhead that same year.
“I just loved the way the Model A looked and sounded,” he says. “I’d go in the shed and sit behind the wheel. You could pull the seat up and crawl into the space beneath the folded rumble seat, and I caused a great stir one time by falling asleep and nobody knew where I’d gone. It was a cozy, happy place.”
Next, his father purchased the 1938 Rolls-Royce Phantom III that was to establish the path the son would follow. “The Phantom was in very rough condition and my father wasn’t mechanically inclined, so it ended up going to Reg Beer Coachbuilders for paint and wood, then Hyphen Repairs for mechanical restorations. I was dragged along all the time.” And at some point, was hooked.
By his late teens, he knew he wasn’t like the other kids: yes, he was into muscle cars, but the classics sparked his imagination. “Loving Duesenbergs as I did, I wondered, ‘What is it about them that makes them so revered?’”
A summer job at Hyphen Repairs became an apprenticeship, learning from a master, Hyphen proprietor Ralph Curzon, that Rolls-Royce motorcars were revered for comfort, civility, above all durability.
“When I made master technician, it was a proud moment – but the next proudest was completing rebuilding the Phantom III’s V-12 last year,” Webb says of the car he inherited.
Now the Silver Cloud beckons. He worked on this very car many years ago at Hyphen. He bought it in pieces in 2013. He points to the boxed frame, the substantial shock absorbers built into the upper A-arms. “Henry Royce’s attitude was that everything should be over-built. ‘Take the best that exists and make it better,’ Royce said.”
Between Hyphen and Ferrari, Webb worked at Grand Touring Automobiles as a tech, sales person and service advisor. “The relief I get working on the Rolls, it’s just me, back to my roots, thinking through problems as a tech. I may not remember numbers, but I find there’s memory in my hands.”
Remo Ferrari, dealer principal at Ferrari of Ontario, is known to get on his case, saying he really should be driving a Ferrari. “I tell Remo, ‘I cut my teeth on Rolls-Royce.’”
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