The board of directors of  "Trompenburg" were looking for ways to prove internationally that the Spyker C4 was a top class quality car. Obviously Rolls Royce cars were more or less the standard for top quality cars and so it was decided to emulate the famous Rolls Royce Silver Ghost 15,000 miles Glasgow to London test-drive of 1907. Of course technology had moved on since then and the local situation in Holland was much different from that in Great Britain, so Spyker defined a new goal: to break the Rolls Royce record by driving 30,000 km (18,642 miles) in one Spyker C4 by continuously repeating a route between Nijmegen and Sittard (in the south, most hilly part of The Netherlands).
A team of drivers set out on November 27, 1920 and on the night of January 1, 1921 the goal was achieved. It took 36 days to drive the 30,000 km, and it attracted a lot of media attention. The Spyker C4 itself was in perfect shape after this grueling drive, there were only some minor signs of wear and 13 valve springs were replaced during the drive. After breaking the Rolls Royce record the car was tributed in Nijmegen and then driven back to the Amsterdam factory the same day, without any servicing. Nobody doubted the rigidity of the C4's construction after that.

There was another record attempt with the C4 which found even more international acclaim: the "double 12-hour" record by S.F. Edge on the famous Brooklands circuit in England. Renown racing driver Selwyn Edge had set the average speed record on this track in 1907 by driving an average of 96.5 kph (60 mph) during 24 hours in a Napier. In 1922 he wanted to break this record since he felt technology had progressed enough to be successful. He picked a Spyker C4 for his new attempt, a car fitted with streamlined racing bodywork which already had been used for some other races by the company.
He succeeded by driving an average of 120 kph (74.5 mph) during 24 hours in this car, no mean feat. Edge was very taken by the quality of the car, and after he had finished he commented to the British representative of the Spyker company: "You provided me with a car which was absolutely faultless in the perfection in which it stood up to the tremendous grueling that a 24 hours run on Brooklands gives a car at speeds ranging from 73 to 80 odd miles an hour, hour after hour. Reliability in every way was most remarkable..."
This record-breaking C4 has been reconstructed by the Autotron museum from original parts in recent years. Only the chassis and the body are not original. This is the car you see on the first picture of this page. As you can see by the cars surrounding it, it's huge, about twice the size of a normal contemporary sports car. It must have been quite a handful to drive at racing speed.

Although the C4 was received very well and its qualities were undisputed, its sales figures were disappointing. The car was far more expensive than people wanted to pay for it and the market for expensive luxury cars was limited and heavily competed. It soon became clear that the Spyker one model strategy couldn't provide for a healthy future for the company.
In a desperate attempt to survive Spyker turned to the French Mathis company for a car in a more affordable market segment. This way the Spyker-Mathis 10 HP became available in 1921. It was a virtually unaltered Mathis with a Spyker badge, powered by a 1132 cc 4-cylinder engine and with a 2400 mm wheelbase (the C4 had 3470 mm). This car was a lot cheaper than the C4: a C4 torpedo costed about fl. 17,000 where a Spyker-Mathis torpedo could be had for fl. 4,950, only 29% (!) of the C4 price also.
But the world wasn't waiting for a Spyker-Mathis and so it disappeared from the catalog in 1922.

By 1921 the financial situation of  "Trompenburg" had become very awkward again. The sales of the C2 truck, the Spyker-Mathis and the C4 all fell short of expectations. The export to Great Britain was reduced because of new high import duties and the factory had too much parts in stock, which had been bought too expensive. In Great Britain the price tag on the C4 was about as high as that on the Rolls Royce 40/50 HP Silver Ghost and the Hispano Suiza H6, all very renown and highly coveted motors, and it costed about twice as much as the comparable Minerva 30 HP from Belgium. This made selling the cars pretty hard and total profits too low to survive.
The C4 chassis was improved in 1921 and four wheel brakes became standard in 1922 (as shown on the car in these pictures). Unfortunately that didn't help its fortunes.

In 1922 the company had to file for bankruptcy again. The management had been fired and Spyker's distributor in Britain, Spyker Ltd, acquired the factory. The company was reorganized and continued in slimmed down form. Prices of the chassis were lowered considerably and development work was stopped for the main part.
In the years that followed ownership of Spyker changed a few times, but it was all a matter of slow liquidation and limiting losses. The factory had a large stock and production of the C4 (and C2 truck) lasted until the parts in stock had depleted.
This lasted until 1926 when parts and funds had run out. Then the liquidation of Spyker became definitive, production was stopped and all assets were sold. By that time the belief in a feasible and profitable car production in The Netherlands had disappeared and only a general feeling of disappointment remained.

It's estimated that total Spyker car production up to 1926 lies somewhere between 1500 and 2000 cars, which isn't much for more than 25 years of manufacturing. Spykers were always rare cars, exotic but technically advanced and dependable. Less than 20 complete Spyker cars have remained to this day, most of them displayed in Dutch museums. In time the frustration over the Spyker failure in Holland was replaced by admiration for these wonderful cars and the achievements which were made. More and more the Spyker name became a synonym for quality over profit and idealistic engineering, values that appeal somehow to the Dutch.
Instead of being forgotten Spyker became an icon, a name each Dutchman knows about, regardless of knowledge of cars. As a brand name it had some potential also, but nobody had thought about using it.... 

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