Terry: I appreciate your finding the SES car article interesting and your sending me the reference to the new speed record.
It puzzles me that the news of this new, steam car, speed record appeared on BBC only recently as the record was achieved in August. There was a coverage of the event here in the general press at that time. The steam nuts wrote about it, of course, also. Coincidentally, a 4-page coverage of that event appeared in this last issue of the SACA newsletter where my SES article is (the manuscript's submission dates to the 2009 summer also - editorial backlog, I guess). SACA did provide both metric and I-P numbers, and I am adding also the SI numbers and a somewhat facetious description of the two records separated by 103 years of intense engineering progress. :-) FIA 1906 record: 121.57 mph / 195.64 km/h / 54.35 m/s. FIA did not recognized the also recorded 127.66 mph. The engine was the typical Stanley Motor Carriage Co. design except that the boiler was placed behind the driver in the otherwise also stock chassis. The body was custom made for the race; it was in the shape of an "inverted canoe" as could be expected for it was built by a canoe manufacturer located near the Stanley works in MA. The car did contain one truly racing detail - the shape of the chimney protruding from the body was streamlined for the record runs. The race track was the beach in the town of Ormond Beach FL at low tide. FICA 2009 record: 148.31 mph / 238.68 km/h / 66.30 m/s. The engine was especially developed steam turbine, the car a dedicated racer. A result of a decade worth of developments. The race track was the racing strip at the Edwards Air Force Base in CA. I cannot resist to pick on the British achievement further by pointing out that if someone could dust off the Stanley Steamer and bring it to the EAFB, Yankee ingenuity might humiliate them. Unfortunately the Stanley car disintegrated during the last run at Ormond Beach after it hit a bump in the sand that lifted it off throwing the driver and the boiler out. It has been rumored that the car was going 150 mph when it hit the bump. True? We will never know. But it would have been 1.7 mph faster than the present record. On the sand at low tide. USMA members will be interested in learning that the record runs in the Stanley days were for 1 km, not 1 mile; the mph numbers were a conversion. Stan Jakuba To see the modern steam car run, click http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/2/hi/uk_news/england/8221383.stm To read about SES steam car, click http://www.steamcar.net/jakuba-1.html To appreciate the cheapest, simplest, cleanest, small, steam expander click http://www.steamcar.net/jakuba-2.html
