How a cyclist won the inaugural Gordon Bennett Cup

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Plenty of motor manufacturers started their manufacturing career in motorsports, especially in the early days. After all, when you wanted to become a winner in times when not yet everything was invented leave alone readily available, what better way to start then build your own car to your own wishes, your own requirements and your own conditions?

Frenchman Fernand Charron (1866 - 1928) was one of those pioneers of motor racing and motor manufacturing. He started his sporting career as a successful cyclist, though, winning the 1891 French Nationals on his bike, a tricycle it seems and no doubt one to his own design.

But then the motor car came into Charron’s life and what followed was a chequered career in the earliest of motorsport scenes. Charron became an avid competitor in ‘Concourses des Voitures sans Chevaux’ (competitions for horseless carriages) and he was good, too. He won Marseille–Nice in 1898 and Paris–Amsterdam–Paris that same year, finishing the latter race a full 20 minutes ahead of his nearest rival. A win in Paris–Bordeaux followed in 1899 as well as the inaugural Gordon Bennett Cup (Paris–Lyon) of 1900. Charron became involved with Panhard & Levassor and the various car projects of Adolphe Clément – another pioneer who’d started in cycling and with a daughter he later married.

By 1901 the time had come to start his own motor car company CGV, with the first initial standing for his name. Remarkably, perhaps, the marque did not become the success hoped for and did not last long either. But Charron then founded a new marque in 1912. Readers of the magazine ‘l’Auto’ were asked to come up with a name and this became ALDA – an acronym for "Ah - La Délicieuse Automobile!". It lasted until 1922, by which time Charron had stopped racing himself for years.

It is perhaps remarkable that Charron is not better known. The respected British racing driver and founder of the Automobile Association Charles Jarrot wrote about him: “As a really brilliant driver, Charron at his best had no equal, excepting perhaps the invincible Levegh, and he will always be included in that band of pioneers who, at the commencement of the sport of automobilism, made interesting and important history.”

Words by Jeroen Booij. Pictures courtesy of Rijksmuseum Amsterdam.

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