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At 59 Boulevard des Invalides, “Monsieur Charles,” the longtime production chief of Delahaye Automobiles, pushed through the front door of the apartment building. He had a lot on his mind as he prepared to meet with the company board. There were big decisions to be made about its future, if it had one.
“The thirties were doom-laden,” wrote one historian. “Nothing is more evocative of France at this moment than the picture of the grand old lawyer Poincaré, the national leader who had done so much to pull his country through the First World War and its aftermath. Worn out and ailing, he retired to his country house in Lorraine, and, opening the window with trembling hands, would look anxiously at the eastern horizon. He felt ‘they would come again.’”
Weiffenbach may not have feared the Germans that morning, but there was much to trouble him in the decade later known as “the hollow years.” Bumbling politicians were struggling to contain a tide of problems: spiking taxes, an unbalanced national budget, rising unemployment, xenophobia, and poisonous social problems.
Only a few years before, the French auto industry had boasted over 350 manufacturers; now only a few dozen remained. The Great Depression and the subsequent collapse of the export market had decimated their ranks, and even the Big Three—Peugeot, Renault, and Citroën—were on the ropes. The stolid, reliably conservative Delahaye company, known for building vehicles of consistent quality, was in dire straits, its production of cars and trucks down to a fraction of their former number. Something needed to be done or Weiffenbach would have to institute broad job cuts.
Madame Marguerite Desmarais welcomed Weiffenbach into her elegant apartment. Her brother, Georges Morane, who had partnered with her late husband Léon to buy out the company’s eponymous founder in 1897 was there too. Georges and Marguerite were now the lead shareholders, but they had long ago given over day-to-day control to their nephews, who were also board members and who were present at the meeting.
Gathered at the dining-room table in the apartment, the board put two options to the vote. First, Delahaye could abandon cars altogether and focus instead on its line of utility vehicles: trucks, buses, and fire engines. Second, they could pursue an aggressive policy of expansion, hoping that the cost reductions from mass production would carry them through to brighter days. Prior to the meeting, Weiffenbach and the board had investigated both options, and it was in the nature of the energetic production chief to push for expansion, capital-intensive though it would be.
After much deliberation, Marguerite Desmarais issued her opinion: “Midrange touring cars built in high numbers—you say you can’t build them without major investment. Your uncle Georges and I can’t invest on this scale, but we don’t want to lose control of the company. So that’s the problem, boys.” Neither would only producing utility vehicles prevent the company from singing its swan song.
She proposed an inspired third option: “If you can’t build automobiles in quantity, build fewer but better ones. Win races to make the marque better known and to sell more luxurious and expensive cars. That is the decision which we take today.”
Marching orders in hand, Weiffenbach headed back to the factory at 10 rue du Banquier. Delahaye was returning to competition, where the company first made its name when founder Émile Delahaye participated in the 1896 Paris–Marseille–Paris race. His automobile company was only two years old at the time. Unlike other early French manufacturers, such as Peugeot, which used Daimler engines, Delahaye built his own from scratch, making his patented Type 1 model the first 100 percent French-made car when presented in Paris. The two-cylinder engine, horizontally mounted in the rear, was rated at 6 horsepower. The car featured electric ignition (versus the typical Bunsen burners heating platinum tubes), an automatic carburetor, and one of the first uses of a radiator to cool the engine. At its debut, the design won unabashed praise, but few sales.
Delahaye, who was fifty-three years of age and had previously built machines for the brick trade in Tours, decided that he needed to show off his Type 1 in a race. Moreover, he intended to pilot one of his company’s two vehicles himself, weak constitution be damned.
The 1896 race started from Versailles on September 24 and covered a distance of 1,062 miles over ten days. On the first day, the thirty-two entrants headed down the macadam roads, sometimes in excess of what was then a hair-raising 20 mph. The next day thunderstorms and gale-force winds raged and trees fell across the roads along the route. A Bollée tricycle car crashed into one. Another blocked Émile Delahaye. He commandeered a saw from a local farm, separated the tree into three parts, and removed the middle section.
The delay dropped him to sixteenth place, but the other Delahaye, driven by aviation pioneer Ernest Archdeacon, remained in a solid sixth. The rains continued. Each day more cars dropped out, some because their engine’s Bunsen burner couldn’t maintain a flame, and others after a crash or, in one exceptional case, a head-on attack by an enraged bull.
Fewer than half the entrants completed the race. With an average speed of 14 mph, Archdeacon finished seventh; Émile Delahaye came in tenth. Most important, he had proved his car’s durability, and a line of customers followed.
Late the following year, desirous of an expanded operation but lacking the physical health that would be required to achieve it, Delahaye sold his company to two Parisian industrialists: Georges Morane and Léon Desmarais. The Morane family ran a candle-making concern in Les Gobelins—a Paris district crammed with tanneries, dyeworks, and other industrial plants—and the new owners moved the automobile manufacturer from Tours into a factory there, on the rue du Banquier.
Before Émile Delahaye’s retirement, he made one more notable mark on the company’s future by hiring twenty-eight-year-old Charles Weif-fenbach to lead production. What Weiffenbach lacked in experience he compensated for with hard work and an ability to hire—and inspire—the best. The company blossomed under his watch.
By 1902, the Delahaye company had dropped out of motor racing. There was no need for the expense. The company produced a range of new passenger cars that sold well in their own right. It had made a few unconventional leaps ahead of most other firms—a shaft-driven transmission, an overhead camshaft, a V6 engine arrangement (two banks of three cylinders at a 30-degree angle)—but Delahaye primarily built very conservative vehicles known for their robustness. “Solid as a Delahaye” was the company’s calling card.
Following his instinct to explore other markets, both domestically and abroad, Weiffenbach also built trucks, taxicabs, postal vans, farm equipment, and boats.
By 1913, the company was producing 1,500 vehicles a year, ranked in the top ten of French automobile manufacturers, and provided healthy profits for its owners. “Monsieur Charles” was decidedly the force behind its success. He was a no-nonsense leader, blunt as a hammer. Weiffenbach kept his office close to the factory line and rarely stayed behind his desk. He set the pace for his staff, literally, taking many quick-stepped walks through the workshops. If he asked his workers for overtime, he stayed late as well. They were like family to him. He expected the highest standards in materials, precision tools, and production methods. He rooted out inefficiencies and employed economies of scale at every opportunity. Few managers better exemplified the motto “Tough but fair.”
As the 1920s passed and inexpensive, mass-produced cars became the standard, Delahaye continued to mint a range of pricey models defined by what many generously labeled “sober elegance.” In reality, the company was stuck in the past, as symbolized by its radiator cap: a helmeted Gaulish warrior. Its automobiles were durable and safe, but they were no longer remarkable.
“The typical product,” wrote British motorcar historian Cyril Posthumus, was a “somber, high-built sedan with claustrophobically small side and rear windows, a rear trunk, heavy-hubbed wheels showing all the nuts without even the grace of plated caps, cart springs, and a rice pudding performance.” French car historian François Jolly described Delahaye’s ideal customer as a bourgeois “provincial notary in a black suit, white fake collar, black tie, and soft hat,” who felt comfortable “seated solemnly in a square box without ostentation.” In this period, Jolly concluded, Delahaye built “the perfect car to drive in a funeral procession.” In other words, the company was headed down the road toward oblivion, accelerated by the worldwide slowdown.
Despite satirical comments from the press that someone had slipped “a Benzedrine tablet into Grandma Delahaye’s café au lait and achieved an inspiring metamorphosis,” Marguerite Desmarais had given Weiffenbach a sound plan to right the ship in early 1932. Her strategy echoed the one Ettore Bugatti had suggested to the Delahaye chief of production at about that same time. “Charles,” he said, “for years you manufactured excellent machines, but they don’t appeal to customers, and they have no speed because you make them as heavy as your fire department trucks. If your cars were lighter and faster, you could prosper again.” Bugatti also advised Weiffenbach to race again.
Many years had passed since Delahaye had made any great design strides, let alone competed in motorsport. Few believed that Monsieur Charles would take such a risk, and fewer still believed that Delahaye would succeed in emerging, as one critic remarked, “from the shadows of a 30-year hibernation.” Weiffenbach was willing to take the gamble if it meant saving the company.
The sun was shining brightly at Montlhéry, the famous autodrome outside Paris, when a peculiar-looking car bearing no indication of its make or model drove out onto the track. The chassis was long and stood high off the concrete. Its thin-skinned body was a flattened oval at the front and stretched out in the back like a beetle’s tail. At the wheel, which was centered awkwardly forward, was Albert Perrot, a former test pilot and a race car driver of moderate success. Overseeing the last-minute tweaks to the engine was a nattily suited man of similar age with a bushy mustache and a gaze that always seemed to be trained on a spot far off in the distance. His name was Jean François.
Soon after the board meeting that decided Delahaye’s change in direction, Monsieur Charles tapped François to lead the company into a new era of fast and agile cars. He was not given free rein to spend whatever he wanted, nor was he given unlimited time to study the problem. Typically, Weiffenbach expected François to produce a practical and economic solution in short order. The strange vehicle at Montlhéry that day in early 1933 was the first fruit of his efforts.
Under the hood was a 3.2-liter, straight-six-cylinder engine, the modified version of the Type 103 engine that Delahaye had first produced in 1928 for three-ton trucks, which their factories remained equipped to make. Tough, strong, and able to run for long periods at full throttle, the truck engine could be forced in a way few car engines could handle.
The “son of a truck” engine on the prototype car at Montlhéry was coupled with a light chassis featuring independent front suspension. This was the first Delahaye vehicle to allow the wheels to move independently of one another, an advance the company was already well behind in adopting. Its purpose was to keep the tail (wheels, tires, brakes, and assemblies) from unnecessarily wagging the dog (pretty much everything else on the car) so as to allow for a smoother, better-handling drive over a range of surfaces. Back when such a suspension was far from the fashion, François had designed one for his former employer.
Wearing a black cloth helmet and white driving suit, Perrot took off down the concrete track. The car quickly surpassed 70 mph, a speed within the capacity of most Delahayes at the time. Then the needle on the speedometer crept higher, and higher, and Perrot steadied out at almost 100 mph. For the next three hours, he maintained that average speed to complete an even 500 kilometers around Montlhéry’s banked autodrome.
Other makers had fielded faster cars over similar distances, but for Delahaye the achievement was akin to magically turning a tortoise into a hare. Struck by the performance of the ungainly-looking car, a visitor at the track asked the attending mechanics, “What on earth was that?”
“Eh bien, M’sieur . . . That was our new Delahaye. It will be at the Paris Salon.”
Held in the Grand Palais, just off the Champs-Élysées, the 1933 Paris Motor Show, or Salon de l’Automobile, was a smashing success for Delahaye. Weiffenbach introduced two sibling versions of their new design direction, both deemed “Super-Luxe,” with sleek bodies and triangular front grilles created by a high-end French carrossier. Like many auto manufacturers, Delahaye produced everything but the bodies of their cars, leaving customers to order bespoke ones from the coach-builders of their choice.
The first version, Type 134, featured a four-cylinder, 2.1-liter engine and independent front suspension on a chassis with a short wheelbase of 112 inches. The second, more powerful version, Type 138, matched the specifications of the prototype tested at Montlhéry: a straight-six, 3.2-liter engine, with the same suspension as the 134 but with a wheelbase a foot longer. The French motorsport press celebrated the two designs.
During the Salon, Perrot even repeated his 500-kilometer performance at Montlhéry in front of a herd of reporters and spectators who had come out from Paris for the day.
It did not take long for buyers to appear. Lucy Schell was foremost among those who were captivated by the Delahaye presentation. She wasted little time showing up at the rue du Banquier factory.
Weiffenbach was working through some papers in his office when his secretary peeked in through the door to inform him that he had two visitors. They did not have an appointment but had insisted on seeing him nonetheless.
“Their names?” Weiffenbach asked.
“The Schells: Lucy and Laury,” his secretary answered.
Before Weiffenbach could invite them inside, Lucy Schell burst into his office, her husband in tow. Weiffenbach knew them by reputation. Lucy was too big a personality in the Paris automotive scene to go unnoticed.
“You may have heard of us; I am Lucy O’Reilly Schell, and this is my husband Laury.” She did not wait for a reply. “We like the look of your new Super-Luxe and want it for the Rally next season. The 138 is too big, so it will have to be a 134.”
Beside her, Laury smiled sheepishly. He was accustomed to Lucy driving the conversation. She continued, explaining that the 134 would do for now as it was, but they thought that Delahaye should put the straight-six engine of the 138 into the shorter, lighter chassis of the 134 to improve its potential as a sports or rally car.
“Can I ask you,” she said. “Are you considering that, at all?”
“Ah, ça alors,” Weiffenbach said, sensing that he was already in a negotiation. “I’m afraid that would be impossible. My engineers are far too busy to undertake a special project like that. In any case, I thought you drove a Talbot?”
“Talbot is finished, Monsieur Weiffenbach,” she answered, never one to stay long with a single manufacturer. “Everyone knows that. That’s why we came to you.”
He hesitated for a moment, not least because he was bowled over by the sheer force of personality that had come into his office. Laury had not yet managed a single word. “What I can do is to prepare a 134 Super-Luxe rally car for you,” Weiffenbach said. “It may be rather expensive.”
“I’ll pay whatever’s necessary,” Lucy said. They struck a handshake deal.
Weiffenbach neglected to reveal that Jean François was already ruminating over how to shoehorn the 3.2-liter engine into the chassis of its junior sister, just as the Schells suggested. The reason: Delahaye itself would be fielding competitors in sports-car races the next season.
Great ambitions were afoot.
Part II
4
Crash
RENÉ DREYFUS SEEMED to be heading for his first win of the season at the Grand Prix du Comminges on August 14, 1932. Speeding around the fifteenth, and penultimate, lap in a Bugatti T51, he widened his forty-second lead over his nearest competitor, Jean-Pierre Wimille. Then, in a sudden shower, rain poured from an overhanging cloud, pelting the spectators in the hillside grandstand that overlooked the Pyrenees to the west and soaking the road. The downpour disappeared as quickly as it came.
Miles away, zooming down the road beside the River Garonne, René never even knew about the cloudburst. Minutes later, he shot down the long straight before the right-hand, uphill curve by the grandstand. As he went into the slick bend at 100 mph, he felt his Bugatti lurch sideways. The spectators gasped. He twisted the wheel and changed gears, trying to regain control—all the while fully aware of the horror of what was happening. For a millisecond, he thought he had regained a purchase on the road when his left rear wheel struck a bump. Instead, the slight leap of his tire was high enough for the physics of flight to take effect.
The Bugatti soared upward on its front end and corkscrewed in the air. Thrown from the cockpit, René bounced across the pavement like a rock skipped across a pond. His car leveled an acacia tree on the roadside and staggered to a halt in front of the press stand. Dazed, confused, René tried to stand. Officials rushed to his side before he fell, his face covered with blood.
An ambulance hurried him to the local hospital. As he drifted in and out of consciousness, the doctors cut off his overalls and examined him. He suffered several bad lacerations and a severe concussion, but he would live. At one point, he opened his eyes to see Wimille enter his hospital room. René muttered something like, “Did you win?” before passing out again.
When he awoke, his countryman remained in the room. In fact, he was in the neighboring bed, his head wrapped in bandages. The twenty-four-year-old had crashed at the same spot. Neither he nor René knew who finished first until Freddie Zehender entered with a bottle of champagne. He had been in third position, three minutes behind Dreyfus and Wimille, but won nonetheless.
“Thank you very much,” Zehender said. “Let’s have a drink.”
For the next week, René remained in the hospital, reliving the terrifying accident.
