1907 Stanley H4 Gentleman’s Speedy Roadster

The briefing is still clanking around your head as you try to make sense of your surroundings. Incongruous feelings of intense foreignness and intimate familiarity are afoot here. There are pedals and there are instruments, but not much in the way of bodywork. Most of the action seems to be occurring beneath your seat, but then this is a Stanley steam car and the boiler is sited below the car. That said, there isn’t the sort of clattering and vibration you would normally associate with something made in 1907. Not even close. The lack of commotion is almost eerie.

Your internal monologue has been replaced with a mantra, which, if you scrape away the bespoke swearing, consists mostly of ‘Don’t screw up’. This deal with yourself collapses the moment you try and ease the car off the line. Let the brake off, reach down to your right to turn the throttling valve open a touch and… shudder, bunny hop, stumble. OK, operate the hook-up pedal which controls the valve timing and we’re off.

And how. Relief masked as laughter soon makes way for a sense of moon-eyed wonder. Somehow, you expect the Stanley will have trouble getting out of its own way, not least because it is more than a century old, but this clearly isn’t the case. Once rolling, and with barely any effort (involvement) on the helmsman’s part, it builds momentum. Torque is instant, and there’s no need to double declutch your way up and down a prehistoric transmission as there isn’t a gearbox or a clutch. In fact, there’s little to do other than hold on.

With modern day supercars, it’s hard to come up with new and inventive ways of describing speed as you often feel slightly detached, perhaps even desensitised, even at ludicrously high velocities. You have a windscreen, torso-hugging seats and all manner of nannying electronic doodads which flatter your driving. You know what to expect but here the revelatory replaces the rote. The Stanley is more exhilarating to drive at an apparent 50mph than any vowel-laden slice of exotica at three times as much. This is due in part to the onslaught of fresh air smacking against your body, each gust threatening to get under your bottom lip and then push it over your forehead. But more than that, we have barely scratched the surface. it hasn’t topped out yet. There’s still more to come. Plus, your progress is accompanied by plumes of white steam which, for once, doesn’t herald a blown head gasket. In this particular instance, it’s pure theatre. Addictively so.

That the Stanley is so fast, all things being relative, should come as no surprise. After all, steam-powered vehicles held the Land Speed Record as far back as 1902. ‘Our’ car was made only a year after Fred Marriott guided the Stanley Rocket to a two-way average of 127.66mph at Ormond Beach, Florida. In doing so, he became the first man to breach the 200km/h (124mph) barrier. Not only that, his 1906 record also marked the first time that a car had beaten the contemporary rail-speed record. It remained on the books until 2009 when the 7.7-metre-long British Steam Car averaged 139.843mph over a measured mile at the Edwards air force base in California.

The car pictured here, the brilliantly-monikered Stanley H4 Gentleman’s Speedy Roadster to give its full title, was in many ways the hypercar of its era. It was offered for general sale in 1907 only, at a base price of $1200. The H4 was fitted with a 20hp engine of 3-5/8in bore by 5in stroke, a 23in diameter boiler and 1:1 gearing. The chassis differed from other 20hp Stanleys in that the boiler was positioned aft of the front axle for better weight distribution while retaining the standard 100in wheelbase. It also had 28in wire wheels with cycle-type wings and step-plates instead of running boards to further shed heft. This skimpy device tipped the scales at just 612kg (1350lb), to which 13 gallons of fuel of 26 gallons of water were added.

Variations on the theme remained in production through 1908, the heavier, lower-geared H5 boasting flared wings, running boards, artillery wheels and so on. Stanley’s promotional material of the day boasted: ‘Our Gentleman’s Speedy Roadster is a light car for two people, and is the fastest stock car in the world… It is indeed a gentlemen’s speeding car, and is intended for those who wish to hit up a speed of 75 or 80 miles an hour on a good safe road, without going to the expense of importing a $10,000 racing machine with its noisy cylinders and high expense for tires and maintenance.’ Quite.

Only two H4s were ever made, though, and this is the only known survivor. Appropriately, it belongs to a man who is evangelical about steam power, Chris Wedgewood. This instantly likable (and endlessly patient) engineer is a globally-renowned expert on this method of propulsion. He also loves speed, the Isle of Man native being a veteran of the legendary TT road race. He is also constructing a steam-powered motorcycle aboard which he intends establishing a few records on his own. What’s more, Wedgewood is also the only man in the world to own a steam-powered, three-wheeled Lomax kit car…

“My family has been involved with steam vehicles and the preservation movement from the outset,” he says. “If you go as back as far as the period from 1840 to 1860, we manufactured boilers for big cotton mills and used horses to deliver them. The interest has passed down generations. The first historic vehicle acquired by the family was a 1919 Sentinel Steam Wagon. That was in the late ’50s. We only got it because the driver was retiring. He had driven it for all its working life and nobody else knew how to operate the thing. It’s just something that I have always been fascinated with, and I have ten or so steam-powered vehicles of my own including boats.”

The Gentleman’s Speedy Roadster is one of the jewels of his collection, but Wedgewood admits that he is not a particularly huge fan of Stanleys as a marque. “Each manufacturer of steam cars had their own way of doing things,” he says. “In many ways, Stanleys were pretty crude by comparison with their rivals, but they worked. What I love about the H4, aside from the fact that it’s fast, is that it looks great. It’s a handsome car and the stance is perfect. The H5, by comparison, looks heavier and less racy. It was more a GT while the H4 was the GTi. Unlike a lot of other cars from the period, it’s also very easy usable. My wife and I recently spent five days driving it around Germany, and covered around 60 miles each day. It will more than keep up with modern-day traffic.”

Wedgewood is, however, at pains to point that it is far from original. How could it be? “If you use something, it stands to reason that parts wear out,” he argues. “The Stanley is a bit like the Woodman’s Axe. The body, such as it is, has been replaced along the way, while the boiler has been replaced and the engine re-bored and so on, but it’s still the same car.”

When attempting to start – of fire – the Stanley, it soon becomes apparent why the steam car lost favour: it takes around 20 minutes to bring to boil. To the uninitiated, starting a car from cold with the aid of a blowtorch is something of a novelty, but it is undeniably fascinating. Such an item is used to preheat the vaporising tube. In layman’s terms, the heat of the fire vaporises kerosene before the fuel is then mixed with air and burned below the boiler.

In essence, the H4 is like a steam locomotive in that it has two pistons. The engine is double-acting, which means that steam pushes alternately on both sides of the piston, providing the same number of power impulses per revolution as an eight-cylinder internal combustion engine. The big difference is that it develops maximum power while stationary. A pair of D-shaped slide valves admit steam to alternate sides of each piston, while also exhausting spent steam from the cylinders. The motion of the valves occurs via a mechanical linkage referred to in steam car speak as Stephenson’s Valve Gear. The hook-up pedal to the left of the brake pedal controls the operation of the engine valves via this set-up. By varying the throttle position, the amount of steam passed from the boiler to the engine varies, and accordingly the speed of the engine is controlled. Cylinder lubrication, meanwhile, is provided by oil injected into the steam supply which in turn also lubricates the engine cylinder and cylinder rings. The exhaust steam is then routed to a heat exchanger where the steam’s heat is used to preheat the water to the boiler. This is just a thumbnail sketch of how the Stanley works, but the remarkable part of its design is that the engine has only 15 moving parts.

Before long, or rather after long, the Stanley is operable and you’re on your way. Fear soon gives way to exhilaration, and power delivery aside, what really impresses is how undramatic it feels. Yes, your jowls are being reconfigured by fresh air, but the H4 doesn’t wander or threaten to spill. You’re not obliged to cling to the tiller like it’s a life raft. Our makeshift circuit around the wonderful Isle of Man Motor Museum where the car is a star exhibit, involves some reasonably testy corners, camber changes and so on, but it isn’t in the least bit skittish. The Stanley is infinitely more user-friendly than any comparable car of its vintage than we can think of.

When guided with greater gusto by its owner, and nudging the British Isles’ legal limit, it seems almost chuckable. Almost. Abner Doble, whose eponymous creations were widely considered to be more refined than Stanley products, once opined that a steam car should: ‘Ride like a magic carpet being pulled by an endless piece of elastic’, and that seems to fit. You would never tire of the torque, that’s for sure.

The look on other road users’ faces is also priceless. You don’t need to be a lip reader to understand what they’re saying. Sentiment is rarely the best lens through which to view anything, but there is something inherently romantic about steam power, and this isn’t confined only to trains. The H4 Gentleman’s Speedy Roadster had one foot in the times and another in a world of its own and is all the better for it.

This article originally appeared in Octane magazine.

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