1920 Templar Experimental Roadster: Cannonball's car

May 5, 2010

1920 Templar Experimental Roadster: Cannonball's car

Flamboyantly professing that its product was the automotive heir to the Order of Knights Templar (formed in the 12th century during the Crusades), the Templar Motors Corp. was born in 1917 in Cleveland.

This story was originally published in 2008

During seven years, the company produced 6,000 luxury vehicles in models that were in some ways technically advanced. It offered such high-tech toys for the time as electric searchlights, tilt steering wheels (nicknamed "fat man's" wheels) and air compressors.

An experimental Templar roadster was the first automotive use of four-wheel brakes. Cannonball Baker, the man who would be NASCAR's first president and the inspiration for the 1980s film Cannonball Run, drove this vehicle from New York to Los Angeles in a record-breaking 1920 ride to demonstrate that Templars were durable and safe, equipped with a new four-wheel mechanical brake system.


In addition to having special brakes, Baker's Templar was custom-built and had a topless aluminum body. The three-speed car had a 43-hp, four-cylinder, overhead-valve engine.

From July 28 to Aug. 4, driving on dusty and rutted roads, Baker and mechanic Arthur Holliday barreled through rain and mud in six days, 17 hours and 33 minutes. Baker supposedly never took off his shoes. When he arrived in Los Angeles, he was lionized by the media for his driving feat. Two months later, piloting the same Templar, Baker crossed six mountain ranges during his record-breaking two-day, four-hour, 1,642-mile Three Flags Run from Mexico to Canada.

Baker's roadster was returned to Templar's factory after his 1920 rides, rebodied and outfitted with a six-cylinder engine.

John L. Smith of Newburgh, Ind., owns two of the estimated 30 Templars known to be in existence, including the one Baker drove, which Smith acquired in the 1960s. As a throw-in, he was given the car's original four-cylinder engine. He has refurbished the car, restored the original engine and put it back under the hood.



"The original four-wheel mechanical brakes did not make for a pleasurable drive, because power steering didn't exist," Smith said. "Baker needed to be strong as an ox to handle that '20 roadster. He was so strong that he had driven motorcycles and a Stutz cross-country. Even on a paved road, the four-wheel-brake Templar handles like a log wagon compared with the two-wheel-brake models Templar Motors manufactured. I can't imagine driving my car far on a dirt road, let alone for six days straight. The company's engineers obviously had a lot of difficulty figuring out how to get four-wheel brakes moving together smoothly with the car's steering mechanism."

In the four years following Baker's run, Templar's engineers tried to improve their four-wheel-brake engineering as other companies also successfully experimented with new brake technology. Duesenberg began selling a four-wheel-hydraulic-brake car in 1923. By the time Templar developed a driver-friendly, four-wheel-brake car in 1924, the company was, for a variety of reasons, nearly out of business.