The Fast Times of Albert Champion Read online

  Published 2014 by Prometheus Books

  The Fast Times of Albert Champion: From Record-Setting Racer to Dashing Tycoon, an Untold Story of Speed, Success, and Betrayal. Copyright © 2014 by Peter Joffre Nye. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Prometheus Books recognizes the following registered trademarks mentioned within the text: Buick®, Cadillac®, Dunlop®, Juicy Fruit®, Oldsmobile®, Vernors®.

  Cover design by Jacqueline Nasso Cooke

  Cover photo courtesy of Kerry Champion Williams

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  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

  Nye, Peter,1947–

  The fast times of Albert Champion : from record-setting racer to dashing tycoon, an untold story of speed, success, and betrayal / by Peter Joffre Nye.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-61614-964-2 (hardback)—ISBN 978-1-61614-965-9 (ebook)

  1. Champion, Albert, 1878–1927. 2. Champion Spark Plug (Company) 3. Automobile supplies industry—United States—History. 4. Racers (Persons)—France—Biography. 5. Businessmen—France—Biography. I. Title.

  HD9710.3.U54C435 2014

  338.7'629258—dc23

  [B]

  2014023876

  Printed in the United States of America

  Prologue

  Chapter 1: Balancing on One Wheel

  Chapter 2: The Fearless Knight

  Chapter 3: A Beautiful Devil

  Chapter 4: The “Human Catapult”

  Chapter 5: A New Century, Another Country, a Fresh Start

  Chapter 6: “Pacemakers Killed”

  Chapter 7: America’s Fastest Man on Wheels

  Chapter 8: “Nearly Killed at Brighton!”

  Chapter 9: National Champion of France

  Chapter 10: Debut of Champion Spark Plugs

  Chapter 11: The Name Game

  Chapter 12: Champion and Chevrolet Smashup

  Chapter 13: Fighting Chances

  Chapter 14: Stars and Stripes Capture the Grand Prix de France

  Chapter 15: A Storm That Breaks Loose

  Chapter 16: Permanent Parisian

  Chapter 17: The Lowdown

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Permissions/Credits

  Index

  NO MORE COLORFUL FIGURE THAN ALBERT CHAMPION EVER HAS BEEN DEVELOPED IN THE AUTOMOBILE INDUSTRY, WHICH IS SAYING PLENTY, FOR THIS BUSINESS HAS PRODUCED MANY BRASS HATS WHO STARTED AT THE BOTTOM OF THE LADDER AND CLIMBED TO THE TOP.

  —CHRIS SINSABAUGH,

  WHO, ME? FORTY YEARS OF AUTOMOBILE HISTORY1

  Never before had there been such a sight in America. Frenchman Albert Champion crouched like a jockey over his new motorcycle, his mop of blond hair windblown over goggles as he tore around the Empire City Race Track in Yonkers, New York, and threw up a tall dirt cloud. It was Memorial Day 1903.2 Spectators in their Sunday finest filled the enormous steel grandstand hugging the home straight of the oval built for sulky racing. Champion circled a lap to build speed for a flying start. When he rocketed in front of the grandstand, his unmuffled engine popped loudly and perfectly. In his wake lingered the pungent odor of oil and gasoline. Thousands of heads turned in unison to watch him approach. The audience, sheltered under the slanting roof from the blazing afternoon sun, studied him in profile. Then he set off on his three laps for the mile. He leaned so precariously through flat turns on the 350-pound Gladiator that the New York Sun described his ride as “hair-raising.”3 He would either set a world record, or crash and die.

  The Gladiator throbbed with three times the power of anything made on this side of the Atlantic.4 Its mighty engine harnessed the muscles of a team of fourteen horses. Raucous New Yorkers applauded, cheered, and tooted horns until an official, crowned in a yellow boater, slashed the air over the start/finish line with a checkered flag. A hush fell.

  Three dedicated timers holding stopwatches in their palms as if they possessed something magical conferred in the judges’ stand on the infield with the announcer. The announcer picked up a megaphone so long he needed both hands and aimed it at the grandstand. He broke the silence by bellowing that Champion had set a new world record—1 minute 4 and 1/5 seconds, a breathtaking fifty-five miles per hour (55 mph).5 The audience shouted approval. Champion waved back from his Gladiator and beamed his showman’s smile.

  In this era, if a city or town had a speed limit, it was 10 mph, as much in deference to the hegemony of the nation’s eighteen million horses and mules as to the terrible state of roads.6 The prospect of driving a machine a mile a minute embodied the holy grail of speed. Champion had been hired from his native Paris to race for a bicycle manufacturer in suburban Boston. He had competed on outdoor board-cycling tracks, called velodromes, on the Eastern Seaboard when cycling rivaled baseball as this country’s most popular spectator sport. However, the cycling craze recently had sputtered out, and sales had plummeted. His employer planned to cease making bicycles and terminate his contract. Now Champion was desperate to break through the minute, a symbolic barrier.

  Champion won the one-mile time trials open to gas-combustion, electric, and steam cars weighing less than a thousand pounds.7 Victory stoked his ambition to reinvent himself as a racecar driver, but autos were far too expensive. He reckoned with unwavering confidence that he could pilot a Gladiator 60 mph around a velodrome. The resulting publicity for his daring and skill could impress an auto company that would hire him. It was a gamble, but it was his only option.

  Later that Saturday afternoon, Champion watched the main event from the infield and gazed in awe upon an exceptionally loud vehicle that careened around turns, rear wheels sliding sideways some fifty feet, tires snarling in the dirt and throwing off tall rooster tails of sand and stones when the noisemaker wasn’t caroming down the straights and raising dust clouds. He heard the car before he saw the driver, Barney Oldfield. Just when the air would clear, Old-field would charge back around and set off fresh dirt plumes.

  Through the dusty haze everyone saw the goggled driver perched on a bucket seat behind an exposed four-cylinder engine. Its gas tank, fuel lines, hoses connected to air-intake valves, and exhaust valves belching black smoke all hunkered down along a boxy wooden frame, ten feet long and painted bright red—a desperate cosmetic touch. The radiator, flat as a door, squatted between the front wheels like a shield. Oldfield hunched his shoulders. He steered a prototype called 999 after the celebrated steam locomotive, the Empire State Express No. 999, a buzzword for speed. The racecar’s designer was an obscure Detroit mechanic named Henry Ford.8

  Oldfield had a folksy manner, and his lopsided awe-shucks grin was part swagger and part pal. He liked to stick out his hand to greet strangers or wave to crowds, saying, “You know me! I’m Barney Oldfield!”

  He and Champion had celebrated their twenty-fifth birthdays that spring, but their backgrounds could not have been more different. Champion grew up in the City of Light near the Arc de Triomphe; Oldfield came from a farm outside Toledo. T
he Frenchman stood to the American’s nose and weighed at least sixty pounds less. Upon meeting at the Empire City Race Track, they recognized they were brothers in speed. Champion knew about the deadly price of speed. He had crashed in a race and caused two fatalities. Yet nothing deterred his passion for speed, the metaphor for his life and Oldfield’s life. Driving to push the limits of man and machine, if they overshot a turn, they wanted to be remembered for going like hell when their chariots took them over the bank.

  America’s auto industry was so nominal that the 1900 US Census had lumped auto manufacturing in the category of “miscellaneous.”9 Oldfield used to pooh-pooh autos as a fad.10 Such a sentiment was widespread. Autos were playthings of upper-class city people, notorious for breaking down, and cursed for spooking horses. However, Champion had immigrated for the 1900 season well aware of the growing popularity of motor vehicles on the continent. The United States lagged about a decade behind France, England, Germany,11 and even little Belgium in production. The modern automobile had been introduced in Paris. For a decade, French engines had been mounted on the front for better balance to negotiate turns with a round steering wheel. Americans made horseless carriages; engines fastened under the high chassis, and the front wheels turned with a tiller that replaced the reins of a horse.

  Oldfield, like Champion, had been a pro cyclist. He drove for the first time in an October 1902 auto meet on the Grosse Point horse track outside Detroit when he had filled in at the last minute for his buddy, who owned 999. On that chilly, overcast afternoon, Oldfield strong-armed 999 like a nightclub bouncer with a rowdy customer. He never let up on the gas in the contest against four rivals, and he vanquished them. He enjoyed a victory lap, then stopped at the end of the finishing straight before he shut off the engine.

  Henry Ford had watched everything from the grandstand. He marched over and posed with Oldfield in his bucket seat for a photograph. Then Ford left to call on newspaper offices and claim credit as 999’s designer. News coverage about the triumph of 999 over three other cars helped Ford secure financial backing to found the Ford Motor Company.

  A cascade of newspaper coverage had changed Oldfield’s attitude about autos. On Memorial Day 1903, at the Empire City Race Track, he was driving in the five-mile pursuit. He and his opponent had begun on opposite sides of the track to chase one another, ensuring that one of the thunderous contraptions flashed past the grandstand every twenty seconds. His adversary piloted a Peerless Greyhound, made in Cleveland and crafted with a hood over the engine and an upholstered leather seat wide enough for a passenger.

  From the start, Oldfield had stomped on the gas pedal. Like a brawler throwing haymakers, he swung 999 wide before every turn then cut in again on the straights. All of his six-foot, 190 pounds of brute strength went into taming the 2,800-pound mechanical monster.12 The back wheels slid and threw up a dirt storm that forced spectators standing behind the fence to flee.

  His opponent steered the Greyhound through turns with finesse. But Old-field won the first five-mile heat with an impressive average of 56 mph. In the next heat, both cars went even faster. The crowd went wild as Oldfield charged through the second mile in 1 minute 1-3/5 seconds, 59 mph.13 The announcer barked through his megaphone that Oldfield had set a world one-mile record around an elliptical track.

  Oldfield won the second five-miler for two straight victories, which gave him the match.

  Of the forty or so drivers in five events in Yonkers, and other motor-mad enthusiasts in cities from coast to coast infected with mile-a-minute fever that summer, Champion and Oldfield led the chase. Neither suspected that driving 60 mph would soon become passé. Or that the friendship they had forged from that day would cause Champion to pay with his life.

  IN THE BUILDING OF THIS AUTOMOBILE INDUSTRY, PERSONALITIES PLAYED A MAJOR PART. THERE WAS THE IDEA OF A SELF-PROPELLED ROAD VEHICLE, CRUDE AS IT IS GRANTED, BUT TO PICK UP THAT IDEA AND CARRY ON TOOK MEN OF IMAGINATION, MEN WITH THE COURAGE OF THEIR CONVICTIONS, RESOURCEFUL, COLORFUL, AND LAST-DITCH FIGHTERS.

  —CHRIS SINSABAUGH, WHO ME? FORTY YEARS OF AUTOMOBILE HISTORY1

  By the age of forty-nine, Albert Champion employed three thousand five hundred workers in his AC Spark Plug Company in Flint, Michigan, and they all passed every workday under his photo portrait, which hung in a large frame over the portal leading into the factory.2 They called him The Chief.3 He looked every inch the chief in his tailored dark suit—fashionable, trim with an air of Gaulic insouciance, stylish Arrow collar points, cuffs showing just so with links of gold, a diamond pin winking in his necktie, hands resting in the pockets of pleated trousers. His attire perpetuated his reputation as a lady’s man. He was of medium height with a commanding presence, accustomed to being stared at by women for his distinguished appearance, enhanced by a fringe of gray hair hugging the sides of his head, and by men for his athletic bearing. This stolid corporate image failed to portray the fame and heroics of his youthful trans-Atlantic energy celebrating that trait so essential to Frenchmen of his generation, la gloire! The man with a predestined name was born in Paris, hard by the Arc de Triomphe, on April 5, 1878,4 upon sawdust.

  Paris had such high infant mortality that the law required parents to take newborns in person with two witnesses to city hall to register them. Champion’s birth certificate, in flowing longhand penned with a quill nib, indicates that his parents, Alexandre Champion, a coachman, and Marie Blanche Carpentier Champion,5 a washerwoman, waited two weeks to bundle him up before they left their home at 11 Avenue MacMahon for city hall in the Seventeenth Arrondissement, a neighborhood known as Batignolles. Witnesses Henri Genet, a metalworker, and Eugène Belly, a laborer, attended to verify the identity of the couple’s legitimate son: Albert Joseph Champion.

  This portrait of The Chief hung over the portal of his AC Spark Plug Company in Flint, where three thousand five hundred workers passed through to work in the factory. Photo courtesy of Kerry Champion Williams.

  Albert, the couple’s firstborn, could now be counted among the City of Light’s two million residents.6 Avenue MacMahon, a tribute to the former soldier-statesman and president of France, Patrice de MacMahon, stretches as one of a dozen streets laid out like spokes of a wheel radiating from Place de l’Étoile, the hub encircling the Arc de Triomphe. Emperor Napoléon had erected the monument in the early nineteenth century to glorify the armies of the empire and to mark the western entry into Paris.7 Avenue MacMahon marked twelve o’clock on the circle, above Avenue des Champs-Élysées, perhaps the most famous boulevard in the world, which intersected at three o’clock. Other thoroughfares honored greats, such as Avenue Victor Hugo for France’s grand man of letters. Champion may have been born to humble parents, but they put him in the center of la gloire!

  In the spring of 1889, on his eleventh birthday,8 Champion was strolling on a sunny afternoon at the end of the chic Avenue de la Grand Armée when he spotted a crowd watching a slim dark-haired young man riding a unicycle. The unique one-wheel contraption without anything whatsoever to steer was enough to make anyone stop whatever they were doing to look. It was the latest gadget, a simple piece of equipment, and the wheel held a neat standard-issue hard-rubber tire. The rider sat with his back in perfect posture, chin up, and appeared completely at ease, as though he were born on that wheel. Although the avenue was lined with tempting sidewalk cafés and boutiques offering fashionable clothes and jewelry, Champion could see that the cluster of elegantly dressed men and women had their eyes fixed on the acrobat. His legs rolled the machine’s short crank arms forward a yard or two, then he abruptly pedaled backward exactly to where he had started—as though pulled by an invisible cord. The stunt incited applause and shouts of bravo! The unicyclist spun around like a coin on a tabletop. People gasped. Then with a slight forward dip of his torso, he zoomed ahead and made four sharp square turns that took him back to where he had started. His movements looked silky smooth and magical. Spectators clapped and cheered. They tossed franc coins into a cloth cap on the sid
ewalk, the coins so plentiful that each new deposit clinked.

  Champion stuck around until the performer in due course popped off his unicycle and landed on his feet, one hand holding the device by its leather saddle. The acrobat graciously smiled and bowed his head, nodding and thanking everyone before he bent down to pick up the cap and tips. Champion enthusiastically introduced himself to Alexandre Tellier.9

  Tellier looked at the eager youngster, curly blond hair parted down the middle of his head in the fashion of the day, gray eyes flashing with excitement, asking an outburst of questions.10 Champion had a build that a journalist described as resembling the Greco-Roman statues bequeathed to posterity for admiration in museums.11 Something about him impressed Tellier. He volunteered good-naturedly to mentor the lad. They were in the neighborhood of Porte Maillot, the entrance to the Bois de Boulogne, the magnificent park on Paris’s west end. Tellier and Champion found a grassy section to get started.

  There Tellier instructed his protégé on the proper basics of mounting the unicycle and riding—head held straight on the neck, backbone upright as though it were an extension of the seatpost holding the saddle, lean forward slightly, arms out for balance, and legs pedaling. The trick was to keep the wheel rolling and to point with your chin to where you want to go. You can set a wheel rolling and it will continue on its own until it slows down. Tellier had him practice on the grass. Most everyone can learn the basics of riding a regular bicycle in less than an hour, but a unicycle can require at good day or two of concentrated trial and error. It takes that long to sense that your center of balance lies just below your navel.

  Fortune smiled upon young Champion. He caught the eye of Henri Gauliard,12 a civil engineer in his late thirties with a bike shop in the eastern township of Noisy-le-Sec. Gauliard happened by chance to visit the Porte Maillot neighborhood on business.13 He was struck by Champion’s agility and vigor.14 He offered the precocious youngster employment to perform acrobatics outside his bike shop in Noisy-le-Sec to lure in customers. Champion could not afford to buy a unicycle, but Gauliard, the father of two girls,15 and sensing a business opportunity, offered to provide one. Champion quickly accepted. They shook hands.16