The maddest motoring marathon: a look back to the New York-Paris

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Much has been said and written about the famous 1907 Peking-Paris race, with new books still appearing and reruns of the race itself being organised every now and then. It makes the 1908 New York-Paris race almost seem underexposed, so perhaps the time has come here for a little coverage of this mad marathon, sometimes also referred to as The Great Race.

That name is no exaggeration. There’s no doubt that Peking-Paris inspired the Americans to come up with this race in 1908, but while the European original had been a real war of attrition, this one was supposed to be a virtually Herculean effort.

The route planned was nothing but gruesome, crossing America westward from New York to San Francisco first, then taking a ship to Alaska, crossing the Bering Strait just below the Arctic Circle, and drive all the way from Russia’s eastern wastes to Siberia, the Ural and finally Moscow and into Europe. To make things even tougher, the organisers decided to start in the winter, on February 12th. Oh dear...

That was asking for trouble and, indeed, impossible driving conditions in Alaska saw the race rerouted across the Pacific by steamer to Japan and then to Vladivostok, Siberia, by ship, to begin crossing the continents of Asia and Europe. Just three of the six competiting cars (three French cars with French équipes plus one each from the U.S.A., Italy and Germany) made it past Vladivostok with all the French competitors having given up at that stage, leaving just the German, Italian and American teams moving slowly through what had to be the harshest of conditions. "At several points, forward movement was often measured in feet rather than miles per hour."

The German team, driving a 40hp Protos, was first to arrive, some five and a half months after the start, on July 26th. However, they were awarded a 30-day penalty for skipping Japan and covering a stretch of Russia by train with the car in a railcar. That gave the American team the victory—it drove a Thomas Flyer and arrived in Paris four days later on July 30th. The Italians in their Züst eventually finished third after a massive gap, arriving in September, 1908.

Words: Jeroen Booij
Picture: source unknown

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