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The Great Race of 1908
 Movie buffs may
recall the delightful 1965 Blake Edwards movie, The Great Race. It
starred Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon, and Natalie Wood
involved in an auto race around the world. Many may not
know, however, that the film was based on a real event
that took place in 1908. There are two glaring bits of
poetic license in the film: (1) in spite of the original
plan to do so, the real race cars did NOT drive through
Alaska and over the ice-bound Bering Straits to Siberia
(the way they do in the film); and (2) none of the
participants looked anything like Natalie Wood! Other
than that, the real race was just as good as the film.
An excellent account of the race comes from Antonio Scarfoglio
(1886-1969), a journalist for il Mattino, the Neapolitan daily
newspaper. Antonio was one of the three drivers of the
Italian team that entered the New York-to-Paris car
race. He wired back 50 dispatches to his paper as the
race progressed and then published them in book form in
1910: Il giro del
mondo in automobile (Around the World by
Automobile). The Italian car, a Zust, was one of
six starters and one of the three vehicles that actually
finished the race.
The race was sponsored by the Paris newspaper, Le Matin, and came
hard on the heels of the spectacular Peking-to-Paris
race of 1907. This one would be even better!—leave New
York, drive to the Pacific, get to Alaska, cross the ice
at the Bering Straits, drive through Siberia back to
Europe and Paris. Thus, on February 13, after an ocean
voyage from Le Havre, the Zust met the other entries at
the Times building in New York City for the start.
Scarfoglio describes the competition:
"...the US entry, the Thomas Flyer
...sleek and low like a dolphin... the German Protos, short and
squat on its rough wheels...the three French
cars: the pyramid-like De Dion Bouton and the fragile and
small Motobloc
and the Sizaire...as
if all the manufacturers have built bits and pieces of
the national psyche into their cars ...including our
own Italian Zust,
slim and nervous."
(Slim and nervous or not, the Zust was a good example of
emerging auto technology of the day: it was model 28/45
HP, produced from 1905 through 1908, with four
cylinders, chain drive, and a top speed of 60 mph.)
In the Zust with Scarfoglio were the main driver, Giulio
Sirtori, and the mechanic, Heinrich Haaga. Scarfoglio
wired the Mattino
that he expected "to reach Paris on July 15." That
estimate was a gross miscalculation of the difficult
journey ahead. (The roads were primitive; the first
coast-to-coast road in the US, the Lincoln Highway,
would not open until 1913.) Driving north from New York
City, all of the car have problems in the snow. In spite
of the problems, Scarfoglio's car covers 350 km in the
first three days; one car, however, the Sizaire, has
already dropped out. As they head toward Chicago, the
cars are still within hours of one another and often
change the lead. Approaching Chicago, the temperatures
drop to -26° C. (-13 F.), and all the cars at some
point have to be towed by animals. Scarfoglio leaves
Chicago on March 1. The cars start to spread out. The
Thomas Flyer is leading as they head into the plains.
Another French car, the Motobloc, gives up the ghost.
Now there are four.
In the month of March in Nebraska, all the cars at some
point "ride the rails". That is, while the rules
prohibit loading your car onto a train from one point to
another, nothing says you can't get up there on the
track and straddle one rail, one wheel on the outside
dirt and the other on the railroad ties between the
tracks. It's bumpy, but it's better than no road at all.
In late March, the Italian team has to fight off a wolf
pack in Wyoming and by the end of March are in
Goldfield, Nevada; they head for Los Angeles, which they
reach in the first week of April after a six-week trip
across the US (three times longer than planned).
By this time, Scarfoglio's Zust, the German car and the
one remaining French car are days behind the Thomas
Flyer. They race for San Francisco where George
Schuster, the American driver, is already embarking for
Valdez, Alaska. On April 13, Scarfoglio writes that the
ice in Alaska has begun to melt and that crossing the
Bering Straits would be impossible. Indeed, the Thomas
Flyer has to turn back from Valdez, Alaska because of
the thaw. All of the four remaining cars leave for
Yokohama by ship and cross to the west coast of Japan on
roads that are so steep and full of tight hair-pin
cutbacks that the cars have to be picked up and carried
through each turn. They cross to Vladivostok by a
two-day ferry trip. The German team, led by Lt. Col.
Hans Koeppen of the 15th Prussian Infantry, is the first
to land at the Russian port. Then, the Italian and
French cars disembark from a second ship. A few days
later, the Thomas Flyer, delayed because of the Alaska
detour, shows up. Suddenly it's a race again.
In Vladivostok, the remaining French car drops out, and
the main Italian driver Sirtori is unable to continue.
The Flyer and the Protos leave the Russian port on May
21 in the driving rain. The German car had picked up a
15-day penalty for having used a train from Ogden, Utah
to Seattle in the United States. Rather than spot the
other cars the 15 days in Vladisvostok by waiting out
the penalty, the Protos leaves Vladivostok together with
the American car; the German driver says that even if he
doesn't "win" the race, he wants to cross the finish
line first (which he does, many weeks later, in Paris,
four days ahead of the Flyer). The Italian car, now with
only Scarfolgio and the mechanic aboard, waits for a
couple of weeks for permission from the home office to
continue.
The plan of all three cars: make for the Manchurian
railway and straddle a rail, as they did in the Western
US, or drive on the access roads still in use by
construction crews (the Trans-Siberian railway would not
be completed until 1913). The route: through Manchuria
and Mongolia and on to Irkutsk, across Lake Baikal, on
to Novosibirsk, Omsk, Yekaterinburg, across the Urals
into European Russia, on to Moscow, St. Petersburg,
along the Baltic into Poland, then Germany and home to
France.
From Vladivostok to St. Petersburg is about 6,000 miles
as the crow flies. Crows, however, are well above the
rain and mud of Siberian spring, bandits, very wild
animals, and a few close calls with the Trans-Siberian
train. And crows never have to send out for gasoline.
The three cars are now headed for Lake Baikal, beyond
which they start picking up decent roads, helped along
by better weather.
The Zust is welcomed in Moscow by the
Italian ambassador to Russia. Near St. Petersburg, the
Italian car frightens a horse drawing a cart; the animal
bolts and throws a young boy riding in the cart to the
ground. The child dies and Scarfoglio and Haaga are in a
Russian jail for three days before the authorities
decide that they are not responsible. They are sent on
their way, are given a hearty welcome in Berlin, and on
September 17, six weeks behind the other two cars, they
roll into Paris after seven months. Officially, the
American Flyer finishes first, the German Protos second,
the Italian Zust third.
Antonio Scarfoglio lived through an
age of great change. When he was born, the steam engine
was king and powered flight a fantasy, but a few days
before he died in 1969, his old newspaper, il Mattino, was
running photos of Armstrong and Aldrin rehearsing the
first moon landing. Amid all that, who knows if, towards
the end, Scarfoglio didn't harbor whimsical thoughts
about the modern world, maybe something along the lines
of, "Yes, going to
the moon is some pretty fine technology and, no doubt,
a great adventure...but you know something?...I drove
a car around the world in 1908."
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