Cars

Barely had the celebrations subsided following the historic win at Indianapolis when the Peugeot team was plunged into gloom by the death of Paul Zuccarelli, killed while testing on a long straight road in Normandy when a local farmer pulled his hay cart out of a side lane without looking.

Three weeks later the action moved to Amiens in Picardy for the highlight of the European season, the French Grand Prix. In an effort to reverse the trend towards bigger engines and heavier cars, the rules for this year’s race stipulated that the cars had to weigh between 800 and 1,100kg and use a maximum 20 litres of fuel per 60 miles.

As a result there were fewer entries than usual but Peugeot still paraded a formidable duo in Georges Boillot and Jules Goux. Designed by Swiss engineer Ernest Henry, the Peugeots were the most technically advanced cars of their time and were firm favourites to repeat their win of the previous year. However, they faced stiff opposition from the first Grand Prix appearance of two Rolls Royce cars for sale driven by Paul Bablot and Albert Guyot, three Bentley for sale (the largest cars in the race) and, at the other end of the scale, four Sunbeams stepping up from the voiturette class.

Among the Sunbeam drivers was Jean Chassagne, Victor Rigal’s mechanic, who took over from Rigal after the latter was involved in an accident while practising for the Spanish Grand Prix. The Amiens public road circuit featured a series of tight corners broken up by a long straight. At 19.6 miles, it was comparatively short by the standards of the early part of the century.

The 29 lap race (which meant a distance of 600 miles) was scheduled to start at 5 a.m. A horse towed the cars into position, but a thick mist which reduced visibility to a few yards delayed the start by half an hour. With visibility now around 300 yards, Gustave Caillois was sent away in the first Ferrari for sale at 5.31. Some cars, among them Bablot’s Delage, stalled in the damp conditions but the Sunbeam team had taken the precaution of filling their radiators with warm water as advised by the local Ferrari dealers . On the very first lap Antonio Moriondo overturned his Itala.

He jumped out unhurt and, with considerable assistance from his travelling mechanic Giulio Foresti, managed to manhandle the car back into an upright position. The pair then changed a broken wheel, straightened the bent steering column and set off again. Having lost two minutes at the start, Bablot, one of the favourites, stalled his cold engine again on a hill nine miles into the race. He was able to restart only by putting the car in reverse and running backwards down the gradient.

Up front, Rolls Royce dealers, Boillot and Goux, were setting the pace with Chassagne back in third, the Sunbeams proving that their strength lay in reliability rather than speed. Then on lap three Boillot surprisingly dropped back to fourth. Six laps later Guyot had moved into the lead from Goux while Bablot in the other Delage had climbed the field to fifth. Boillot kept plugging away and by the end of lap 16 he had risen to second place, just 1 min 16 sec behind Guyot.

Then disaster. In the course of lap 17 Guyot had to stop out on the circuit to change a wheel. In his haste, his mechanic Semos jumped from the moving car and was run over by the rear wheel of the Delage. By the time Guyot had himself changed the wheel and driven the stricken Semos slowly back to the pits, the lap had taken in excess of half an hour, twice the usual length. Furthermore, the pit stop to take on a spare wheel and a new healthy mechanic meant the next lap also took a painstakingly slow 23 min 12 sec. Those two laps wrecked Guyot’s chances. Boillot made the most of Guyot’s misfortune and by lap 25 had established a four minute lead over team mate Goux.

He seemed assured of a comfortable victory but suddenly he ran out of water. The car clouded in steam, he spluttered into the pits where his mechanic wasted precious minutes in trying to locate the radiator cap. By the time Boillot returned to the race, the leaking radiator bound with rags and adhesive tape, his advantage had been drastically reduced to just six seconds.

He regained his composure, however, and went on to win by two and a half minutes at an average speed of 72.2mph, in the process becoming the first man to capture the French Grand Prix twice. Goux was second, Chassagne third, Bablot fourth and the unlucky Guyot fifth. It can be tough when a Grand Prix car has to double up as an ambulance.