Photograph: Alamy
Italian journalist Luigi Barzini remembered the unexpected welcome he received in Russian villages east of the Ural Mountains in 1907. Peasant women spat in his direction, and made what he described as “strange signs of exorcism.” This treatment had to do with the mysterious contraption Barzini and his companions used to pass through the villages. It was a motorcar – an Itala, to be exact – and its occupants were heading on an extraordinary endeavor, an 8,000-mile race from Beijing, then called Peking by those in the west, to Paris. With Prince Scipione Borghese directing progress, aided by his chauffeur Ettore Guizzardi and Barzini, the Itala had been comfortably pacing the field as it motored toward the Urals.
At the time, the future of the car seemed in doubt. It was widely viewed as a luxury item that paled in comparison to the horse as a means of transport. Driving a car from Asia to Europe seemed madness given the scarcity of roads, much less good roads – to one newspaper, the Peking-Paris seemed as improbable as sending humans to the moon via telegraph. Yet the eventual winner, Prince Borghese, proved that the race could be completed – and so did the international rivals he left in the dust, including a memorable French conman named Charles Godard and his Dutch-made Spyker. The Peking-Paris helped usher in the age of the automobile, a radical change of society at all levels that we’re still grappling with today, as examined in a new book by British author Kassia St Clair, The Race to the Future: 8,000 Miles to Paris.
“It’s a really compelling, cinematic, amazing story,” St Clair says, “about a very glamorous period in history. It starts to become this moment in history when technology upends the world.”
It wasn’t just automotive technology – there was also the telegraph, which reporters aboard the cars used to update the public at rest stops. Coverage appeared in newspapers around the world, including the French publication Le Matin, which conceived of the race to burnish the glory of its nation as the hub of the automobile. Things didn’t work out as planned. An Italian team won by a comfortable margin, and the next year, Henry Ford’s Model T debuted in the US – a sign of momentum shifting to the other side of the Atlantic.
Momentum was hard to come by in the race. Just an hour after the five-car field headed off from Peking, mechanical problems forced the exit of one competitor, the three-wheeled, French-made Contal Mototri. The remaining competitors faced rough going from start to finish – heatstroke in the Gobi Desert, record rainfall in Siberia, a broken wheel between Perm and Kazan in European Russia.
“They had a lot of equipment, a lot of spare parts,” St Clair says. “In the early days, they had to cross really steep terrain. There was no road, but a kind of donkey and horse track, not wide enough, not designed for them.” As for the issue of fuel, she added, “They were constantly reacquiring oil. The Spyker consumed a half liter of oil a day. You go through an awful lot of oil in the middle of the Gobi Desert.”
If anyone could surmount these difficulties, it was Borghese. While his single-mindedness alienated French rivals who were more prone to sticking together, it kept him focused on the end result. It helped that he had undertaken a previous expedition in the Middle East. And unlike his competitors, when Russian race officials recommended taking a different route across the Urals, he did so.
“He had advantages, but was prepared to do the work,” St Clair says. “He seemed to more readily be open to local, on-the-ground knowledge.”
“Maybe I felt some kinship,” she adds. “This [book project] was so big, took so many years, it forced me to be perhaps more methodical in my research and note-keeping. It was a tremendously big project … It was similar to the way, perhaps, Prince Borghese approached his challenge.”
How methodical was St Clair? She mapped out each team’s progress over the course of the race – a map that occupies a place of honor on her wall. She consulted vintage auto manuals from the years preceding the race, some of which sit on her bookshelves. And she consulted descendants of the competitors, including Barzini’s great-great-grandson, whom she tracked down the day before the manuscript headed to press.
She interspersed the narrative of the race with chapters about contemporaneous developments related to the automobile – from the overlooked story of female drivers to reflections on soon-to-be-vanished dynasties in China and Russia to the use of motorized transport in the first world war, which all but ensured the primacy of fossil fuels over alternative measures such as electricity and alcohol.
“It’s a pick-your-own-adventure style,” she says. “You can read all the contextual chapters first, all the race chapters first.”
She likens the structure to that of her previous books, The Secret Lives of Color and The Golden Thread: How Fabric Changed History.
“The way they were structured, you don’t have to read beginning to end, but dip in and out,” St Clair says. “I quite like writing like that. I’ve gotten feedback from readers – readers engage with this. They like the freedom to dip in and out.”
The contextual chapters sometimes raise questions about the role of cars in society then and now – questions of personal importance to the author. A self-described child of the mid-80s, she recalls trips in her father’s wood-paneled Volvo and the moment she got her conditional license on her 18th birthday. Now a mother to a young daughter, she’s tried cycling, and acknowledges her view of cars has changed.
“I still have the kind of kernel of cars as glamorous, exciting and necessary,” St Clair says. “The glamor and excitement are connected in my mind with adventure.” Yet, she adds, “as a kind of urban dweller, I’m very aware of the damage they can do, the risks they pose, the pollution, the noise, the inconvenience to other people.”
There is a through line from her first book, The Secret Lives of Color, to her latest one. She came across an explanation of why Italy adopted “racing red,” rosso corsa, as its auto racing color. The story went that it had been the color of Borghese’s Itala, and she included it in her book. It turned out that wasn’t the case, but by this time she wanted to know more about the Peking-Paris.
“At the time, I was really hooked,” St. Clair says, “completely fascinated by the story,” which had “mysteries, rumors and accusations still swirling well over one century after the race had finished.”
Many of these questions had to do with Godard, notably the issue of how he managed to make up mileage in Russia at an unimaginable pace that threatened Borghese’s.
The full total that Godard made up was 2,700 miles in two weeks, including one epic 500-mile burst.
Bruno Stephan, the Dutch mechanic who reinforced Godard during this stretch, only confirmed much later in life – at age 88 in 1963 – that this ground was covered not by car, but via train and boat. Godard had long since passed from the scene, dying in 1919.
“[Godard] performed this series of incredible tests of endurance,” St Clair says. “He seemed to be a problem-solver. He was charismatic, made a huge impression on people who only met him very briefly.”
Then she began charting his movements on her map, along with those of his competitors.
“I had a breakthrough moment,” she says. “His reported movements through space were really suspicious, did not make sense.” She speculates as to what would have happened “had other people at the time looked at a map, looked at what he said.”
Even so, it’s not quite enough to make him the book’s villain.
“All the world loves an antihero, a scamp,” St Clair says, adding, “My respect for the prince also grew.”
It was fitting, then, that Borghese and his team were the ones finishing first to the adulation of crowds in Paris.
“[The race] became a kind of global news phenomenon,” St Clair says. “It was really interesting to see, because of this very kind of global demonstration of what the car was capable of. It excited people.”
For the author, it brought back memories of watching Drive to Survive during the Covid lockdown.
“There are echoes of that now,” she says of the Peking-Paris. “The world following teams and stories of human drama, money, sportsmanship, glamor. The seeds of so much of the way we feel about cars, the way cars have radically changed the world, are right there in this incredible journey.”
