The age of the car was a long time coming. The 19th century belonged to the train and, to a lesser extent, the bicycle. Several prototype automobiles were built during this period, but by the end of the century the technology was still primitive. In 1899 a handicap race held in France pitted walkers, riders, cyclists, motorcyclists and drivers against one another. The horses came first and second.
However, in the early years of the 20th century, a series of widely publicised challenges increased popular interest in motoring. The most ambitious was set in 1907 by the French newspaper Le Matin: a non-stop race from Peking to Paris, taking the car across mountains, desert and steppe to prove its practicality.
Just five vehicles entered the competition: a three-wheeled Contal Motori resembling a motorbike; a Dutch Spyker driven by a charismatic chancer named Charles Godard; a pair of cars from the manufacturers De Dion-Bouton, then the world’s most successful marque; and an Italian Itala five times the size of the Contal and six times the horse-power, driven by Prince Scipione Borghese, with a correspondent from the Corriere della Sera also on board and a family servant acting as mechanic and chauffeur.
This is the stirring story Kassia St Clair tells in The Race to the Future. Its opening pages resemble Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines, the comic film from 1965 about a fictional air race to Paris. This contest features the same amateurish mix of competition, camaraderie, and national pride, as well as a larky sense of adventure: ‘Down goes the flag. Smash goes the bottle. Shards of emerald glass and champagne spume catch the light. The race from Peking to Paris has begun.’
To begin with, progress is slow.
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