The Great Race of 1908
Movie buffs
may recall the delightful 1965 Blake Edwards
movie, The Great Race.
It starred Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon, and Natalie Wood
involved in an auto race around the world. Many may not
know, however, that the film was based on a real event
that took place in 1908. There are two glaring bits of
poetic license in the film: (1) in spite of the original
plan to do so, the real race cars did NOT drive through
Alaska and over the ice-bound Bering Straits to Siberia
(the way they do in the film); and (2) none of the
participants looked anything like Natalie Wood! Other
than that, the real race was just as good as the film.
An excellent account of the race comes from Antonio Scarfoglio
(1886-1969), a journalist for il Mattino, the Neapolitan daily
newspaper. Antonio was one of the three drivers of the
Italian team that entered the New York-to-Paris car
race. He wired back 50 dispatches to his paper as the
race progressed and then published them in book form in
1910: Il giro del
mondo in automobile (Around the World by
Automobile). The Italian car, a Zust, was one of
six starters and one of the three vehicles that actually
finished the race.
The race was
sponsored by the Paris newspaper, Le Matin, and came
hard on the heels of the spectacular Peking-to-Paris race
of 1907. This one would be even better!—leave New York,
drive to the Pacific, get to Alaska, cross the ice at the
Bering Straits, drive through Siberia back to Europe and
Paris. Thus, on February 13, after an ocean voyage from Le
Havre, the Zust met the other entries at the Times
building in New York City for the start. Scarfoglio
describes the competition:
...the US entry, the Thomas Flyer ...sleek and low like a dolphin... the German Protos, short and squat on its rough wheels...the three French cars: the pyramid-like De Dion Bouton and the fragile and small Motobloc and the Sizaire...as if all the manufacturers have built bits and pieces of the national psyche into their cars ...including our own Italian Zust, slim and nervous.
In the Zust with
Scarfoglio were the main driver, Giulio Sirtori,
and the mechanic, Heinrich Haaga. Scarfoglio wired the Mattino that he
expected "to reach Paris on July 15." That estimate was
a gross miscalculation of the difficult journey ahead.
(The roads were primitive; the first coast-to-coast road
in the US, the Lincoln Highway, would not open until
1913.) Driving north from New York City, all of the cars
have problems in the snow. In spite of the problems,
Scarfoglio's car covers 350 km in the first three days;
one car, however, the Sizaire, has already dropped out.
As they head toward Chicago, the cars are still within
hours of one another and often change the lead.
Approaching Chicago, the temperatures drop to -26° C.
(-13 F.), and all the cars at some point have to be
towed by animals. Scarfoglio leaves Chicago on March 1.
The cars start to spread out. The Thomas Flyer is
leading as they head into the plains. Another French
car, the Motobloc, gives up the ghost. Now there are
four.
In
the month of March in Nebraska, all the cars at some
point "ride the rails". That is, while the rules
prohibit loading your car onto a train from one point to
another, nothing says you can't get up there on the
track and straddle one rail, one wheel on the outside
dirt and the other on the railroad ties between the
tracks. It's bumpy, but it's better than no road at all.
In late March, the Italian team has to fight off a wolf
pack in Wyoming and by the end of March are in
Goldfield, Nevada; they head for Los Angeles, which they
reach in the first week of April after a six-week trip
across the US (three times longer than planned).
By this time,
Scarfoglio's Zust, the German car and the one remaining
French car are days behind the Thomas Flyer. They race for
San Francisco where George Schuster, the American driver,
is already embarking for Valdez, Alaska. On April 13,
Scarfoglio writes that the ice in Alaska has begun to melt
and that crossing the Bering Straits would be impossible.
Indeed, the Thomas Flyer has to turn back from Valdez,
Alaska because of the thaw. All of the four remaining cars
leave for Yokohama by ship and cross to the west coast of
Japan on roads that are so steep and full of tight
hair-pin cutbacks that the cars have to be picked up and
carried through each turn. They cross to Vladivostok by a
two-day ferry trip. The German team, led by Lt. Col. Hans
Koeppen of the 15th Prussian Infantry, is the first to
land at the Russian port. Then, the Italian and French
cars disembark from a second ship. A few days later, the
Thomas Flyer, delayed because of the Alaska detour, shows
up. Suddenly it's a race again.
In Vladivostok,
the remaining French car drops out, and the main Italian
driver Sirtori is unable to continue. The Flyer and the
Protos leave the Russian port on May 21 in the driving
rain. The German car had picked up a 15-day penalty for
having used a train from Ogden, Utah to Seattle in the
United States. Rather than spot the other cars the 15 days
in Vladisvostok by waiting out the penalty, the Protos
leaves Vladivostok together with the American car; the
German driver says that even if he doesn't "win" the race,
he wants to cross the finish line first (which he does,
many weeks later, in Paris, four days ahead of the Flyer).
The Italian car, now with only Scarfolgio and the mechanic
aboard, waits for a couple of weeks for permission from
the home office to continue.
The
plan of all three cars: make for the Manchurian railway
and straddle a rail, as they did in the Western US, or
drive on the access roads still in use by construction
crews (the Trans-Siberian railway would not be completed
until 1913). The route: through Manchuria and Mongolia
and on to Irkutsk, across Lake Baikal, on to
Novosibirsk, Omsk, Yekaterinburg, across the Urals into
European Russia, on to Moscow, St. Petersburg, along the
Baltic into Poland, then Germany and home to France.
From
Vladivostok to St. Petersburg is about 6,000 miles as the
crow flies. Crows, however, are well above the rain and
mud of Siberian spring, bandits, very wild animals, and a
few close calls with the Trans-Siberian train. And crows
never have to send out for gasoline. The three cars are
now headed for Lake Baikal, beyond which they start
picking up decent roads, helped along by better weather.
The
Zust is welcomed in Moscow by the Italian ambassador
to Russia. Near St. Petersburg, the Italian car frightens
a horse drawing a cart; the animal bolts and throws a
young boy riding in the cart to the ground. The child dies
and Scarfoglio and Haaga are in a Russian jail for three
days before the authorities decide that they are not
responsible. They are sent on their way, are given a
hearty welcome in Berlin, and on September 17, six weeks
behind the other two cars, they roll into Paris after
seven months. Officially, the American Flyer finishes
first, the German Protos second, the Italian Zust third.
Antonio
Scarfoglio lived through an age of great change.
When he was born, the steam engine was king and powered
flight a fantasy, but a few days before he died in 1969,
his old newspaper, il
Mattino, was running photos of Armstrong and
Aldrin rehearsing the first moon landing. Amid all that,
who knows if, towards the end, Scarfoglio didn't harbor
whimsical thoughts about the modern world, maybe
something along the lines of, "Yes, going to the moon is some pretty fine
technology and, no doubt, a great adventure...but you
know something?...I drove a car around the world in
1908."
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