Rolls-Royce's First 100-mph Car Is Back on Show as the Silver Ghost Turns 120
Chassis 1701, which ran London to Edinburgh locked in top gear and later hit 101.8 mph, is on display at Goodwood for the anniversary.
Rolls-Royce is marking 120 years since the 40/50 H.P. made its debut at London's Olympia Motor Show in November 1906. That's the car history knows as the Silver Ghost, and the one that first earned the brand its "best car in the world" tag. The anniversary comes with a working exhibit: chassis 1701, a 1911 car that still holds the brand's first 100-mph run, is now on display at Goodwood.
The timing is neat. Rolls-Royce has just put the 593-hp Spectre Series II on public roads, so the company's oldest benchmark and its newest electric car are in the news in the same week.
How a single car named a whole model
The 40/50 H.P. was built around a smooth six-cylinder engine and Henry Royce's obsession with reliability at a time when breakdowns were part of motoring. The name came from marketing. Claude Johnson, the company's first commercial managing director, christened one car, chassis 60551, "The Silver Ghost" for its silver paint and silver-plated fittings. Owners started calling their own 40/50s Silver Ghosts, and the nickname stuck to the whole model.
Johnson then used competition as advertising. The cars ran the Scottish Reliability Trial and the Austrian Alpine Trial and won the Spanish Grand Prix. Rolls-Royce says this public proof mattered to buyers who were spending a fortune on a machine many still didn't trust.
The car on display: chassis 1701
Johnson called chassis 1701 "The Sluggard," a joke given what it did. Ernest Hives, then an experimental test driver, drove it in the 1911 London–Edinburgh Trial with the gearbox locked in top gear the whole way. It averaged 19.59 mph and returned more than 24 mpg, according to Rolls-Royce. That figure is in imperial gallons, or about 20 mpg in US terms. It beat the economy and speed figures Napier had set before.
After the trial, it ran 78.2 mph over a half-mile. Later in 1911, fitted with streamlined bodywork, it reached 101.8 mph at Brooklands and became the first Rolls-Royce to top 100 mph.
The car, registered R 1075, is not a museum piece. In September 2021, the 20-Ghost Club sent it back up the old Great North Road from London's Royal Automobile Club, again locked in top gear, with nine other Silver Ghosts of similar age. A new Ghost escorted the convoy to Edinburgh. In 2013, it had also joined 47 Silver Ghosts on the 1,800-mile route of the 1913 Alpine Trial.
An American chapter
The 40/50 H.P. stayed in production from 1906 until 1925. Rolls-Royce says 6,173 were built in Britain and another 1,703 at its factory in Springfield, Massachusetts, for a total of 7,876. Ten more armored-car chassis followed in 1927. Owners included Winston Churchill and Howard Hughes. T.E. Lawrence called the armored Silver Ghosts he used in World War I "more valuable than rubies."
The model also introduced the Spirit of Ecstasy. Lord Montagu of Beaulieu's Silver Ghost was the first car to carry Charles Sykes' figure, which became the official mascot in 1911.
Why Rolls-Royce keeps coming back to it
The brand still trades on the name. In 2018, it built a 35-car Silver Ghost Collection of the modern Ghost, with an "AX201" hallmark on a sterling-silver Spirit of Ecstasy. AX201 is the registration of the original Silver Ghost. The shakedown track Rolls-Royce opened at Goodwood in September is named after Eric Platford, the company's first chief tester, a figure from the same era.
"One hundred and twenty years later, those expectations continue to define the standards to which the marque holds itself," said Andrew Ball, the company's head of corporate relations and heritage. Rolls-Royce hasn't announced a special edition or event for the anniversary beyond the display of chassis 1701. It also hasn't said how long the car will stay at Goodwood.
