Amedée Bollee La Mancelle, 1878: The Bollées, father and son, were bell-founders in the town of Le Mans, and long before it became famous for more sporting reasons, they built some of the very first steam wagons in the town – including this one, La Mancelle, built by Bollée senior in 1878. In effect an eight-seater carriage with a large boiler and room for the stoker (or ‘chauffeur’) at the back and a twin-cylinder 15/30hp steam engine at the front, driving the rear wheels by a shaft and chains, it would do a heady 27mph – but there’s no record of how long it would take to stop from that sort of speed. It is in totally original condition, including what’s left of its 1878 paint, and the brass plaque on the body records that it went from Le Mans to Paris in 1878 (for the Paris Exhibition), then to Vienna in 1879 and Berlin in 1880. Motoring was a bit more relaxed in those days.
Le Jamais Contente: Built in 1899, Le Jamais Contente (Never Satisfied) was probably the first car ever designed purely to attack the world’s land speed record – and it was the first ever to take the record above 60mph. It was powered by electric motors and almost entirely filled with batteries, and although the shape looks streamlined, most of the driver’s body sat upright into the airstream. That driver was the intrepid Belgian Camille Jenatzy, popularly known as the Red Devil for his flowing red beard and wild eyes. And having survived a remarkable career as a racing driver he met a bizarre end. He was a famous practical joker, and staying with a hunting party in the Ardennes forest he crept out of the cabin one night and made a sound imitating a wild bore – whereupon one of his friends leaned out of an open window with a rifle, and shot him dead…
De Dion Bouton: Today, we’re used to seeing technical exhibits of skeleton vehicles and animated cutaways, but in 1908 when De Dion Bouton took the hacksaw and drill to one of their cars, it must have been considerably more of a novelty – in fact according to the exhibitors it didn’t really become popular until the mid-1930s, possibly because most people before that were reluctant to chop up perfectly serviceable and very expensive hardware. But the result with the De Dion is stunning. Everything has had the treatment, the four-cylinder 12hp engine, the three-speed gearbox, the wooden artillery wheels, the radiator, axles and chassis rails. It’s a kaleidoscope of polished steel, brass, aluminium and wood all on a huge wooden plinth. And it’s as beautiful as any sculpture.
Renault Galion: In 1934 you might have made your way to the exhibition on a wonderful old Parisian bus just like this one, although Route 96 that this one used to ply ran from Gare Montparnasse via l’Opera to Pte des Linas, and apparently it was in service until around 1950. Wooden-bodied and powered by a six-cylinder 67hp engine driving through a four-speed gearbox, it would have carried up to 34 passengers seated and another 17 standing, and it’s a lovely image of a different Paris that’s long-gone.
Alfa Romeo 8C: They’re launching the limited edition 8C Competizione with a flourish over in Hall 1, but in Hall 8 you can see an example of the car it took its name from – the original Alfa Romeo 8C, in this case from 1936 and with a spectacularly aerodynamic sporting body by Pininfarina. Developed from the P3 Grand Prix car, its 2.9-litre straight-eight engine eventually gave around 220bhp, which gave the 8C a top speed of almost 135mph with the right gearing, and put it on the outer limits of supercar performance in the late 1930s. And this one raced twice in the Mille Miglia, in 1936 and 1937, which is where the Competizione label really originated from.
Bugatti Type 41 Royale: The infamous Schlumpf brothers, who secretly amassed a vast collection of Bugattis and other priceless classic cars while the workers at their factories went unpaid had two genuine Bugatti Royales (of the six built) but decided they needed another, and created this one from a chassis built for the purpose in the late 1960s and then completed with genuine Bugatti powertrain and a body completed in 1990 re-creating a design originally drawn for a Royale by Jean Bugatti (son of Ettore) in 1931. Given its monumental size, it needed the 12.8-litre straight-eight engine and all of its 300bhp, but it would top 120mph, and a bit like the Mancelle would probably need plenty of room to stop – although to be fair, if you did happen to crash into someone else, a Royale wasn’t going to finish second.
Talbot-Lago Grand Prix: In its classic blue French racing colours, the Talbot-Lago Grand Prix racer from 1948 is the absolute epitome of the underdogs that took the fight to Italian giants Alfa Romeo, Ferrari and Maserati in the early postwar racing years, and never quite had the pace to live with them. It’s a lovely thing, though – powered by a 4.5-litre straight-six engine that gave around 250bhp and a top speed of maybe 175mph on a good day, of which it had a few. It also had a four-speed Wilson pre-selector gearbox that pre-dated today’s paddle shifts, and this one was driven by French racing legend Louis Rosier – who also drove the two-seater Le Mans type sports version.
Citroën 2CV: The 2CV Museum that provided this one is clearly a very strange place. Designed and built by French sculptor Jean Fontaine, the 2CV van has become a monster, with streaming hair made from industrial aluminium ducting pipes, bulging eyes that were once big air-pressure gauges in some long-demolished factory, and a gaping bonnet with teeth and steel whiskers where the little two-cylinder engine used to sit. Very strange.
Peugeot 402 Eclipse: There’s very little truly new under the sun. When you look at Peugeot’s 206 and 307 CC coupe/convertibles with their folding metal roofs, think back to this 402 Eclipse Coupe Transformable, built in 1937. Georges Paulin, a full-time dentist and part-time automobile stylist took the car that had introduced aerodynamic lines and art-deco details to Europe in the mid-1930s and gave it a disappearing metal roof that folded, just like they do today into the boot. Originally they did it with electricity, later by hand – and they built 580 of them between 1935 and 1940. It will be interesting to see if any of today’s last as long.
Wimille Prototype n ◦2: You’d have to wonder whether former GP designer Gordon Murray ever spent time in a French motor museum before he put pen to paper for the McLaren F1 supercar in the early 1990s. If he had, he might have seen a car called the Wimille, created, coincidentally, by another man with racing connections – the French Grand Prix driver Jean-Pierre Wimille. In 1948, Wimille built an extraordinary prototype, the second of three, which was distinguished by light weight, very advanced aerodynamics, and a mid-engine layout. It was set even further apart from the late 1940s crowd by a uniquely innovative seating layout, with the driver (and steering wheel) in the centre of the car and room for two passengers, seated one either side of, and slightly behind the driver. All more or less exactly as the 231mph McLaren had almost 50 years later. The engine in the McLaren, of course, was a 627bhp 6.1-litre BMW V12, while the one in the Wimille was a humbler Ford Vedette V8 giving a top speed around 125mph short of that of the mighty F1. And sadly, when Wimille himself died in the 1949 Argentine Grand Prix, his project died with him. But there was no escaping that his ideas had been almost 50 years ahead of their time.
