Here’s a story of crazy ambition: restoring an ancient car when all that’s really left is its engine, and then attempting to break the speed record that the car itself set a hundred years ago. And just look at the car in question! It’s a Darracq, a strange and oddly beautiful monster with a vast engine of 25.4 litres.
On 30 December 1905 this car set the world land speed record of 109.65mph driving along a road in France. Amazingly it had only been finished two days earlier and never tested before achieving its record, although it had been specifically designed for speed.
Its current owner, Mark Walker, plans to break that speed on the very same road. A quixotic pursuit, you might think, and a dangerous one too.
The original Darracq in 1905
Mark has been working for some years to restore the car. It had been bought from Darracq in 1906 by the splendidly named Sir Algernon Lee Guinness (part of the brewing family), who set several speed records culminating in the fastest time of the day and the car’s highest recorded speed of 121.57mph. Unfortunately, a few years later, Sir Algernon’s mother apparently insisted he clear out his junk from the family home, and the car was scrapped. Algernon, known as ALG, later hurriedly got the engine back from a local dealer, but only after the front and rear axles had been cut off.
So the car was a mess. Mark rebuilt it using all the remaining parts of the original that still existed, including the engine in its entirety, but he had to recreate everything else by turning to original photographs from the early 1900s. He enlarged the photos to such an extent that lettering could be read on the tyres, and was able to spot tiny details that he could then correct.
One mystery was a small brass button on the steering wheel. Mark ended up with a drawer full of a hundred brass buttons, none of them quite right. So of course he made one. It turned out that the button’s importance was rather high. It ‘cuts’ the engine, in order to change gear.
Now Mark is taking the old car out and about. The other weekend, for example, it was watched at the Curborough Sprint by Marcus, our sales director, who enjoyed seeing the 100-year-old beast going sideways into corners at crazy speeds. In fact it broke an Edwardian racing car record by a good seven seconds.
We’ll make sure Marcus keeps us up to date on the Darracq and Mark Walker’s escapades.