Franco-Folly Fun
Monday, August 8, 2011 by admin
Today there was a funny, funky small-town, small-time Concours d’Elégance in the tourist-filled small medieval city near our home in southwestern France. It’s an event that takes place every two years. As this was the 11th, it must have been going on since 1989 without me particularly noticing, but this time I had a couple of invitations from locals who know that I “have something to do with cars.” Held in the Jardin des Plantiers, a public park in Sarlat, up the hill behind the Palace of Justice, a nice venue where part of the Festival des jeux du théâtre, now in its 60th year, is also held, it was quite charming and surprisingly evocative.
I am always amazed when I see a real Bugatti in the street, being used as normal transport, but to see several Type 37s running in modern traffic along with half a dozen Amilcars and Thirties MGs is absolutely staggering. Toss in a few Delages from the early twentieth century and you have a spectacle that not even Pebble Beach can quite equal. All the cars in the garden are privately owned by people who are not billionaires, nor even simple millionaires, just happy enthusiasts who have acquired and maintained cars that would inflame the desires of American collectors and inspire auction houses if they knew they existed.
In the Twenties and Thirties there were two French licencees for the Morgan three-wheeler, the Darmont-Morgan and the Sandford. There was one of each in Sarlat today, both beautifully restored (or maintained, I didn’t ask the drivers who were eager to leave the park, scoot around town and then come back to the park to bask in admiration from the several thousand spectators. They were fine, as was the rare Marcos, the superb Twenties Vauxhall (The BMW of its time, which was of course before GM bought and bastardized the badge), a fiberglass monocoque Lotus Elite from the Fifties and a almost-convincing Ferrari P-3 racer. My instinct says it was a brilliant fake, but I couldn’t find anyone to quiz about it.
The car that made the biggest impression today was not a classic, though. It was a 1954 Panhard et Levassor Dyna Junior. I have long contended — for 57 years now — that this was the absolute worst brand-new car I have ever driven. When I was a teen-aged design school student living in a converted garage in the back yard of the house rented by John R. Bond, who was then in the process of acquiring Road & Track magazine from the group of inspired misfits who had created the magazine in the Forties, I gained enough of Bond’s trust to be allowed — rarely — to drive some of the road test cars that came to R&T’s Colorado Boulevard offices in my native Glendale, California.
The two-cylinder, front-drive Junior was in theory the perfect starter sports car, light, inexpensive, responsive. Bond gave me the keys, told me not to go too far away from the office, and come back in an hour. I thought the mechanical clatter was indicative of superior engineering, the clunky gearbox was clearly superior to the MG TD that was the only other sports car I’d ever driven, and the car seemed quick compared to other European cars I’d tried, which at that point included the Renault 4CV and a seriously primitive 1946 VW Beetle owned by Marshall Roath, a classmate at Art Center. My first-ever non-USA drive had been in a Citroën 11 which had made a superb impression by its ability to take a right-angle turn at what then seemed to be a staggering speed.
In my mechanical naivete I thought that ability must be a function of front wheel drive. I had by then read Ken Purdy’s “Pull Instead of Push” text in the 1952 Bantam fifty-cent paperback book, “The Kings of the Road,” so when I got to the first tree-lined residential street, I whipped the steering wheel to the right and pushed the throttle. Structural rigidity may have been part of the Citroën traction avant’s panoply of virtues, but hadn’t penetrated the thinking of engineers in the world’s oldest automobile manufacturer. The noodle-strength chassis twisted, the driver’s suicide door popped open, and I started sliding out of the opening. No belts, of course. I guess the efforts on the steering wheel, which was held in a death grip to keep me from falling out of the car, must have fortuitously been in the right direction. The tail slide stopped, I squared myself away being the wheel, shut the dumb door and motored VERY sedately back to the R&T offices, thanked Bond for the experience and walked home, disabused of any notions I had held about front drive and handling. Citroën good, Panhard bad was firmly installed in my brain.
Seeing the elderly gentleman — possibly younger than I — who may have owned this car since it was new, emerge with some difficulty from the ergonomically-challenged Dyna Junior roadster confirmed my opinion that this was one car whose lack of commercial success we need not regret. It was a piece of crap when new, and it’s still a piece of crap, however historical. But I was really glad to see that at least one example has been preserved in like-new order and still gets an outing from time to time.
If it was the all-time worst brand-new car I’ve ever driven, the Citroën DS-19 that appeared just a year later — and the DS was well-represented in the Plantier — remains the best brand-new car I’ve ever driven. In the context of its time, no other car has ever been as far advanced over its contemporaries as that one was. And in those two you have a really good look at France and its strange ways. Dumb and brilliant, skewed from the norm in both directions, and endlessly fascinating. Just don’t get caught on the wrong side.
I am always amazed when I see a real Bugatti in the street, being used as normal transport, but to see several Type 37s running in modern traffic along with half a dozen Amilcars and Thirties MGs is absolutely staggering. Toss in a few Delages from the early twentieth century and you have a spectacle that not even Pebble Beach can quite equal. All the cars in the garden are privately owned by people who are not billionaires, nor even simple millionaires, just happy enthusiasts who have acquired and maintained cars that would inflame the desires of American collectors and inspire auction houses if they knew they existed.
The car that made the biggest impression today was not a classic, though. It was a 1954 Panhard et Levassor Dyna Junior. I have long contended — for 57 years now — that this was the absolute worst brand-new car I have ever driven. When I was a teen-aged design school student living in a converted garage in the back yard of the house rented by John R. Bond, who was then in the process of acquiring Road & Track magazine from the group of inspired misfits who had created the magazine in the Forties, I gained enough of Bond’s trust to be allowed — rarely — to drive some of the road test cars that came to R&T’s Colorado Boulevard offices in my native Glendale, California.
The two-cylinder, front-drive Junior was in theory the perfect starter sports car, light, inexpensive, responsive. Bond gave me the keys, told me not to go too far away from the office, and come back in an hour. I thought the mechanical clatter was indicative of superior engineering, the clunky gearbox was clearly superior to the MG TD that was the only other sports car I’d ever driven, and the car seemed quick compared to other European cars I’d tried, which at that point included the Renault 4CV and a seriously primitive 1946 VW Beetle owned by Marshall Roath, a classmate at Art Center. My first-ever non-USA drive had been in a Citroën 11 which had made a superb impression by its ability to take a right-angle turn at what then seemed to be a staggering speed.
In my mechanical naivete I thought that ability must be a function of front wheel drive. I had by then read Ken Purdy’s “Pull Instead of Push” text in the 1952 Bantam fifty-cent paperback book, “The Kings of the Road,” so when I got to the first tree-lined residential street, I whipped the steering wheel to the right and pushed the throttle. Structural rigidity may have been part of the Citroën traction avant’s panoply of virtues, but hadn’t penetrated the thinking of engineers in the world’s oldest automobile manufacturer. The noodle-strength chassis twisted, the driver’s suicide door popped open, and I started sliding out of the opening. No belts, of course. I guess the efforts on the steering wheel, which was held in a death grip to keep me from falling out of the car, must have fortuitously been in the right direction. The tail slide stopped, I squared myself away being the wheel, shut the dumb door and motored VERY sedately back to the R&T offices, thanked Bond for the experience and walked home, disabused of any notions I had held about front drive and handling. Citroën good, Panhard bad was firmly installed in my brain.
Seeing the elderly gentleman — possibly younger than I — who may have owned this car since it was new, emerge with some difficulty from the ergonomically-challenged Dyna Junior roadster confirmed my opinion that this was one car whose lack of commercial success we need not regret. It was a piece of crap when new, and it’s still a piece of crap, however historical. But I was really glad to see that at least one example has been preserved in like-new order and still gets an outing from time to time.
If it was the all-time worst brand-new car I’ve ever driven, the Citroën DS-19 that appeared just a year later — and the DS was well-represented in the Plantier — remains the best brand-new car I’ve ever driven. In the context of its time, no other car has ever been as far advanced over its contemporaries as that one was. And in those two you have a really good look at France and its strange ways. Dumb and brilliant, skewed from the norm in both directions, and endlessly fascinating. Just don’t get caught on the wrong side.
