Patina Perfection: the journey of a 1903 Panhard et Levassor

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Every Veteran car could tell tales of an eventful life, but the passage of more than a century has seen so many of them suffer the loss of their provenance or the erasure of their originality. Not so this 1903 Panhard et Levassor 15hp Type C, which has been once abandoned, once raced, and many times rallied.

It was originally sold in London to Walter Cunliffe, first Baron Cunliffe, of Headley Court in Surrey. He was one of the country’s most prominent financiers, having been appointed a director of the Bank of England in 1895. He died in 1920 having never sold the car, and in 1937 it was discovered languishing in an outbuilding by some adventurous Boy Scouts. Lady Cunliffe allowed it to be adopted by the intrigued Scout master, and it was promptly entered in that year’s Brighton Run before contesting the Brighton Speed Trials in 1938. It remained very active until the mid-1960s, when it was renovated in the attractive livery it retains to this day.

There’s more to the Panhard than simply being a very historic and charismatic Oily Rag machine – it’s also a real flyer. Forty-five miles per hour is no problem, and the present owner, in whose family it has resided since 1994, reports that it always gets to Brighton without fail. After a nine-year hibernation, it was recently reawakened and promises to be a highlight of this year’s Veteran Car Run.

You can read more about its storied past in the August issue of The Automobile, available now.

Text by Zack Stiling
Photographs by Rob Cooper

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