Flooring the accelerator delivers a low-voltage shock to the cerebellum.
Creeping slowly from rest, there are relay clicks and a buzz of electricity hard at work as this horizontal rocket takes flight. Then the drive motors begin making soft mooing sounds. Only in France would a vehicle instrumental in sending horses to pasture sound like a contented cow.
Revelations are inevitable when you travel back more than a century to the dawn of speed records. One such revelation is that electric-car pioneer Camille Jenatzy earned so little lasting acclaim for his achievements.
This son of a wealthy Belgian rubber goods manufacturer was one of the first car enthusiasts and the designer, engineer, and driver of La Jamais Contente ("Never Satisfied"), the first car to top 60 mph. Fortunately, Jenatzy's concoction survived to inspire the replica I drove at Paris's Le Bourget airport.
Jenatzy, nicknamed Le Diable Rouge ("the red devil") because of his flaming red hair and beard, was the original speed demon. On a whim, he entered a local hill-climb in November 1898 and won with an average velocity of 16 mph. The rakish Jenatzy loved the taste of victory and soon concluded that racing was an excellent means of promoting the electric cars he was manufacturing for Parisian taxicab use.
Beaten three weeks later by an electric Jeantaud driven by a Frenchman, Count Gaston de Chasseloup-Laubat, Jenatzy responded in kind at the Parc Agricole d'Achères, where Paris's sewage was dumped. The two rivals volleyed the land speed record upward from 39.2 mph (de Chasseloup-Laubat), to 41.4 mph (Jenatzy), to 43.7 mph (de Chasseloup-Laubat), to 49.9 mph (Jenatzy), to 57.6 mph (de Chasseloup-Laubat).
Crouched low in his racer, the fearless Belgian delivered the coup de grâce on April 29, 1899. Scrutinized by Automobile Club of France officials, Jenatzy whistled through the timing trap at 65.8 mph. When asked to describe the feeling of traveling faster than was commonly believed the human body could endure, Jenatzy later revealed: "The car in which you travel seems to leave the ground and hurl itself forward like a projectile ricocheting along the ground. As for the driver, the muscles of his body and neck become rigid in resisting the pressure of the air; his gaze is steadfastly fixed about two hundred yards ahead; his senses are on the alert."
The cars fielded by Jenatzy and his rival pressed the limits of late-nineteenth-century technology. Both attempted to cut drag with aerodynamic bodywork. While the fastest machines extant were massive steam locomotives capable of sixty or more miles per hour, Jenatzy and de Chasseloup-Laubat were more likely inspired by the day's airships, which resembled huge cigars. Attached to a wood and steel undercarriage, Jenatzy's fuselage was tapered at both ends. Although that provided an excellent means of shrouding the 100 two-volt batteries carried onboard, a driver protruding out the top and the chassis slung below offset any streamlining benefits afforded by the torpedo body.
To save weight, Jenatzy's coachwork consisted ofriveted sheets of partinium, which is an alloy of aluminum, tungsten, and magnesium. Two electric drive motors were mounted on the rear axle to drive its wheels with a combined 67 hp.
Jenatzy was also ahead of the curve in his use of pneumatic tires. Horseless carriages of the late nineteenth century typically rolled on steel rims or solid-rubber tires. In 1895, Edouard and André Michelin offered their new pneumatic tires to makers competing in the Paris-Bordeaux-Paris race but found no takers. Their plan B was cobbling together a Daimler marine engine and a Peugeot chassis to compete in the race. The Michelins' L'Éclair ("Lightning Bolt") finished dead last and consumed two dozen inner tubes, but it completed the 732-mile distance within the required 100 hours. Nine of the twenty-two starters went the distance, but only the Michelins rolled back into Paris on pneumatic tires.
