Race to the Future
by Kassia St Clair John Murray, 384 pages, £20
“What needs to be proved today is that as long as a man has a car, he can do anything and go anywhere.” So claimed the Paris newspaper Le Matin in January 1907. The paper then went on to throw down a gauntlet to its readers: “Is there any person… who will accept the challenge of travelling from Paris to Peking… by automobile?”
It was summer 1907 when Le Matin’s challenge was answered. Five vehicles – one of them a three-wheeler ‘cyclecar’ – set off from the Chinese capital in what was the first running of the now legendary Peking to Paris motor race. Ahead of them lay a 9,317-mile odyssey that took in mountains, deserts and rivers – not to mention an ever-shifting kaleidoscope of creeds and cultures.
Given this, it’s no surprise that endurance is a pervading theme of Kassia St Clair’s rip-roaring narrative of a “fantastically uncomfortable” race. One car had its floor removed as a weight-saving measure, meaning that the “transmission shaft whirred and the dusty ground spooled away” beneath the passengers’ feet. Yet at least they were moving. On running out of fuel in the Gobi desert – described here as a “place of agonies” – another competitor’s car had to be towed to safety by a camel caravan. Miraculously, despite such setbacks, four of the five vehicles that started the race eventually made it to the finishing line.
Sticky circumstances A competitor is towed through the mud during 1907’s Peking to Paris motor race, “an epic tale of camaraderie set against themes of revolution, industry and globalisation”