A Cold Start About Cold Starting A Rolls-Royce And A Weird Detail

I’m still freshly back from Goodwood, and there’s still so much stuff to go through, and, knowing me, I’ll likely forget things or come back to them months later. I’ve accepted that. But at this moment, there’s plenty of things that are still nice and fresh, cutting-edge, breaking news kind of things about car that are barely a century old! Barely!

One particular detail is something I spotted on the dashboard of a Rolls-Royce Phantom, I think a Phantom I from around 1925 or so? This particular control caught my eye because it’s a large, prominent switch that was clearly labeled, and labeled with words that, while familiar, when combined were not something I was familiar with.

Here, this is what I’m talking about:

I’m not talking about the big switch over on the right, which took me a while to figure out just what the hell it was – it’s a light switch! The “S &T” and “H, S & T,” both with their fussy little trailing periods, stand for “side and tail” and “head, side, and tail” respectively, referring to which sets of lights you want to turn on.

That feels a lot more needlessly obtuse than just a little two-step pull knob with an icon of a headlight on it, but hey, this is old and for fancy people who appreciate ampersands and other punctuation.

No, the switch I’m talking about is this one:

“Starting carburetter,” using the British spelling of carburetor with their extra “T’ and lack of “O.” I’ve never really encountered the idea of what seems to be a separate carburetor just for starting a car, though I imagine it’s something like what a choke does on a normal carb setup – providing a more rich fuel-air mixture to get the car started.

That does seem to be what’s going on here – in typical Rolls-Royce overdoing it fashion, a simple choke wasn’t enough, and there’s a whole separate carb just to get things started. This is what the starting carb looks like:

Much simpler than the full downdraft Stromberg carb these things tended to use, but still vastly more complex than just a choke valve on a carb.

From what I can glean from these forum posts, the starting carb may have its own independent fuel lines? I’m not entirely sure, but what I am sure of is that starting one of these old Rolls-Royces is a shockingly complicated enterprise.

Here, check this starting procedure out, on a US-built “Springfield” Phantom 1:

Holy crap. I think I’d just start mine at the beginning of the week and leave it running until the Lord’s Day Of Rest, or something. Here’s another video, showing the use of the starting carb specifically:

This starting carb switch is a spring-loaded one, so you don’t accidentally leave it on, which, according to those forums, is bad, and leads to sootiness, which is an indication of a sooty soul and poor character.

I’m also a little confused about the hand throttle vs the foot throttle, the normal accelerator pedal. Are they the same thing, just the hand one is able to stay at a given setting?

Also, while I love driving a manual car and am fine with a manual choke, I think I’m fine with not having to manually adjust my ignition timing or fuel mixture.

What’s really interesting, I think, is just how complex this all was, especially on a luxury car. Things changed quite rapidly from here, and starting most cars by the 1930s was vastly easier. I’ve driven economy cars from around the same time, like a 1926 Hanomag 2/10, and starting them wasn’t much different than starting a modern car – key, starter, some throttle, and that’s it. That feels much more “luxurious” than the dismantling-a-bomb level of complexity of starting one of these Rollers, but maybe the concept of luxury was different then, and less focused on ease.

Besides, most Rolls owners probably had a chauffeur to do this crap; making it more complex just meant they were getting their money’s worth.