Goux was not a formally trained engineer, but as one of the factory’s winning drivers, he’d also become the trusted personal friend and chauffeur for the company’s president, Robert Peugeot. It was Goux who personally convinced Monsieur Peugeot of the informal team’s credibility and potential—no small feat in the highly structured caste society of French engineering, whose members would never have even considered the untrained suggestions of a mere works mechanic.

George Boillot’s proven ability behind the wheel of the smaller-engined Peugeots was impressive, but even more notable was his organizational expertise that eventually proved so valuable. It was he who welded the team’s disparate skills into a serious force to be reckoned with by dealing with various Parisian subcontractors during the construction of their new racing cars and, later, with organizers and promoters wherever they raced.



Photograph Courtesy Indianapolis Motor Speedway

In 1910, brilliant Italian driver Paolo Zuccarelli had been convinced to join the nascent Peugeot team after racing against Goux and Boillot in the Voiturette class and handily beating their single-cylinder racers with his obviously superior four-cylinder, Spanish-built Hispano-Suiza.

Zuccarelli had gone to Spain several years earlier as a teenage apprentice mechanic after meeting and servicing the car that the Hispano representative had driven to Paris from Spain. Hispano’s man had come to Paris with the intention of establishing a facility to build Hispano-Suizas in France. With Spain then in the middle of political instability, the Parisian locale seemed ideal.

Zuccarelli, seeing the racing potential in the obviously more sophisticated Spanish design, managed to convince Hispano’s representative that his skills and passion for fine machinery could best be used in Spain. As a result, Zuccarelli went and stayed in Spain for several years, becoming thoroughly familiar with the firm’s quality and designs. Eventually, he became a valued race driver-mechanic and company sales representative.

Hispano-Suiza’s founder and designer, Marc Birkigt, was then building one of the few marques in the world that could compete with Rolls-Royce in terms of quality and finish. It was the young Italian racer’s eye for the potential in Birkigt’s advanced designs that initially attracted him, but it was most certainly the experience acquired in Spain that matured his abilities and thinking. Upon returning to France to race for Hispano-Suiza and seeing the opportunity with Goux and Boillot at Peugeot—to build and race a car of their own design—Zuccarelli succumbed to the temptation and the die was cast.

Once Goux convinced Robert Peugeot of the validity of his team’s concept, the president quietly agreed to back their promising project to go big-time in the GP class against the world’s finest. Robert Peugeot then had to gain a consensus from his own management. This of course was a formality, but with so much internal discussion, word of the plan leaked and caused a near revolution within Peugeot’s outraged engineering hierarchy. Being unilaterally bypassed by their president for the unproven ideas of a few greasy mechanics seemed insulting as well as highly unprofessional. Soon the outrageous affair was the talk of the entire Parisian automotive community.

Lightning in a Bottle

The four young rebels were soon labeled Les Charlatans for their bald-faced effrontery in challenging the status quo. Peugeot, however, had been very careful to ensure the credibility and success of his highly controversial decision. First, he moved Les Charlatans’ entire project away from the main factory, where it would have been under constant verbal and political attack. It went to a smaller Peugeot-owned company operating under a different name that was quietly developing a special aero engine for the equally fast-expanding French aircraft industry.

Second, Peugeot made a similar, but much quieter, deal with another ambitious young French engineer who claimed he also could design and build a superior GP racer to carry the Peugeot name to victory against Europe’s fastest. His name? Ettore Bugatti. Peugeot’s rules were simple: When both of the new designs were completed and ready to race, the faster of the two would receive his full support for the coming 1912 French Grand Prix in Dieppe.

The runoff between the two teams for Peugeot’s patronage spoke volumes about the future of motor racing. Bugatti’s admittedly beautifully finished racer, with a top speed of 99.4 mph, was completely outclassed by Les Charlatans’ first effort, which turned a then mind-blistering 115 mph.

In truth, the winning Charlatan prototype, although officially called a Peugeot, was actually entered as part of a privateer team under the name Equipe Boillot—much as Enzo’s Scuderia Ferraris were actually custom-built Alfa Romeos some decades later. It was Boillot’s organizational genius that held the team together for Peugeot, while his prodigious talent behind the wheel gave him the personal fame and satisfaction that helped create history.

The unconventional Peugeot team’s first GP racers were unlike anything seen previously. And it wasn’t just the engines.

Everything was reconsidered for the team’s new design, so the engineering focus was on lighter weight in the chassis as well as in the moving components of their revolutionary engines. Instead of building just one car, Les Charlatans built four.

When one comprehends that almost every single detail of these new cars had been merely a figment of the trio’s collective imagination just weeks before the completion of their proof of concept, then one begins to grasp the equal genius of the team’s draftsman, Ernst Henry, a man with a unique talent capable of converting verbal dreams into drawings for buildable parts.

There were few outside sources. Almost everything was conceived and made internally. Once on paper, each of these hundreds of individual components had to be entirely hand-fabricated or carefully machined to an exceptional finish by highly experienced hands, almost like pieces of singular art. Only when all was finally assembled and fired up could the skeptics appreciate the true genius and mechanical innovation of these early racing designers.

In deference to their engine’s displacement, these first cars were referred to as L76s. Smaller by half at 7.6 liters and much lighter than the highly favored Italian monsters from Fiat, these first four Peugeot GP racers literally bristled with new ideas.

It’s easy now to point to their double overhead camshafts with four valves per cylinder and centrally positioned spark plug in the crown of a semi-spherical combustion chamber, or to their slim, vertical, crank-driven shaft on the engine’s nose that in turn drove the bevel gear mounted to the cylinder head that spun the twin spur gears attached to the leading edge of each cam, and then note the close similarity to almost any modern racing engine running today.