Image Courtesy Indianapolis Motor Speedway

When Goux and Zuccarelli first tested on the brick-surfaced Indianapolis Motor Speedway, they encountered serious tire problems. Anxious to make sure his foreign stars would be competitive on race day, the event’s promoter, Carl Fisher, introduced them to experienced American driver Johnny Aitken, who analyzed the problem and determined that the Peugeot’s Michelin tires, combined with the Peugeot’s obvious speed advantage, were an unsuited combination for the circuit’s hard brick surface.

Europe’s softer dirt roads had been much easier on the French rubber. With no American tires available to fit the Peugeot’s Rudge-Whitworth wire wheels, Aitken had only one solution for the Frenchmen’s dilemma: Slow down.

Aitken was hired as the team’s crew chief and strategist for the race, and Goux put his sage advice to good use. During the race, Zuccarelli’s harder-pressed Peugeot lasted only until the 18th lap, going out early with main bearing failure. Goux and his race mechanic, Emil Begin, ran the entire 200 laps with no relief, the first team ever to do so.

Goux kept a steady, reserved pace of just under 80 mph to easily win the 500-miler, finishing a comfortable 13 minutes ahead of his nearest rival, American Spencer Wishart in a Mercer. Even with carefully planned stops for rubber, Goux essentially controlled the race in four intervals by leading 138 of the 200 laps.

Goux and Begin created a minor sensation in the pits—and a great story in the press—by reportedly downing several bottles of fine French Champagne during their pit stops to “refresh” themselves. Later, after collecting his $20,000 winnings, Goux remarked that it was one of his most enjoyable races ever.



Photograph Courtesy Indianapolis Motor Speedway

After the race, in keeping with Peugeot’s practice of selling its cars to offset costs, both the 1913 Indy Peugeot racers were sold to top American drivers Arthur Duray and Bob Burman. The results of this now questionable sale would change motor racing history forever. American copies of the Indy winner’s Peugeot engine, in time, completely altered the direction of previous endeavors.

And it wasn’t just in America: The first four Charlatan racers from the 1912 Dieppe GP race had also been sold to manufacturers in the U.K. and France, so the team’s previously closely held speed secrets soon influenced the details of almost every serious contender in Europe. But it was in America that the winning “Indianapolis Peugeot” engines effected the most change.

The Secret’s Out

By the winter of 1914, the threat of war had changed all of Europe. Peugeot was concerned with far more important matters than motor racing in preparing for the coming conflagration. Bob Burman, who had bought one of the Indy Peugeots, had blown its engine, so he contacted Peugeot for a replacement, hopefully in time for the 1914 racing season. Told the company was no longer in the racing engine business, Burman turned to American racing specialists Harry Arminius Miller and Fred Offenhauser in Los Angeles. The two had recently joined forces to manufacture Miller’s innovative Master carburetor for the general market.

These were selling by the thousands, so by the time Burman contacted Miller Engineering for a new engine, the company had raised enough capital to expand its facilities to specialize in the repair and re-creation of parts for exotic engines from Mercedes-Benz, Isotta, Delage, Hispano-Suiza and Fiat as well as the usual domestics.

Taking delivery of Les Charlatans’ masterpiece and using it to build a brand-new, Peugeot-inspired engine for Burman became an education that gave Miller rare insight into some of racing’s most revolutionary ideas. The opportunity to carefully inspect and then completely redesign, refine and improve the design would change racing engines in America for decades to come.

Subsequent Miller and Offenhauser racing engines, powering every combination of American chassis through the next 60-plus years, showed constant evolutionary refinement and upgrading of the original Peugeot concept. These new Miller engines came in a variety of sizes and configurations, all drawn by brilliant American designer Leo Goosen, and they became the racing world’s mechanical marvels.

They came to dominate all forms of American competition, especially at the Speedway, until the advent of the game-changing, rear-engine, Colin Chapman-designed Lotus 35 with Ford Cosworth power in 1965. But even then, its winning Cosworth V8 was still based on the basic concepts established by Les Charlatans’ 1913 Peugeot Indy winner, an inspirational concept that will no doubt continue to influence dozens of challengers for decades to come.

Genius Endures

Even without Peugeot’s official backing, Boillot’s Peugeot team came again to Indy in 1914, this time as privateers. But it wasn’t quite the same. Zuccarelli had been killed in practice for the French GP shortly after their 1913 Indy win. By May of 1914, almost every other engine builder in Europe had seen what Les Charlatans had invented and was already building or attempting to copy their revolutionary concepts.





Indy’s brick surface chewed up the team’s soft, white tires. Local racer Johnny Aitken (top, in cap) offered a solution: Simply slow down. Photography Courtesy Indianapolis Motor Speedway

The 1914 Indy-winning Delage, with ex-Peugeot driver Rene Thomas at the wheel, may not have been the fastest in qualifying (tires again). However, its engine, recently designed by Thomas’s good friend and ex-Peugeot draftsman Ernst Henry, certainly had many similarities to his earlier Peugeot Dieppe GP winners.

Upon their return to France after Indy in 1914, both Goux and Boillot joined the French army and essentially disappeared in the fog of war. Ernst Henry went back to Peugeot and designed a V8 aircraft version of Les Charlatans’ original four-cylinder racing engine. Peugeot made some 8000 of these V8s to power the revolutionary (first all-metal) Voisin bombers that helped stop the German invasion of France.

In America, development of the Peugeot-inspired Miller engines continued for decades, with two of the special front-drive Miller racing cars that had been taken to France by French racer Leon Duray in 1929 being purchased by Ettore Bugatti for development of his own designs. Time proves change is constant, but original genius remains forever.